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London's Muslim mayor invites Trump to 'educate' him on Islam

London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan has invited Donald Trump to England's capital city to “educate” the bombastic US presidential candidate about Islam.

Khan rejected the notion that Islam was incompatible with modern Western values and said Trump’s “ignorant” views on Islam were “playing into the hands of extremists.”

“I want Donald Trump to come to London so I can introduce myself to him as a mainstream Muslim, very, very comfortable with Western liberal values, but also introduce him to hundreds of thousands, dare I say millions of Muslims in this country, who love being British, love being Western,” the new mayor said in an interview with NBC News on Friday.

In December, Trump called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States after a deadly mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which was inspired by the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group.

The proposal triggered widespread criticism and condemnation in the US and around the world.

Protesters gather outside of the Republican National Committee where Donald Trump was about to meet party leaders on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on May 12, 2016. (AFP photo)
“I want to educate Donald Trump. I want to show him that you can be Muslim and be Western,” said Khan.

Khan, the son of a Pakistani bus driver scored a resounding victory in last week's London mayoral election over his billionaire Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith, who was accused of running a “dog whistle” campaign of drawing attention to Khan’s Muslim faith and trying to link him to extremist groups.

Khan condemned Goldsmith's campaign as coming “straight out of the Donald Trump playbook,” and said he would help Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton beat the billionaire businessman.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, told the New York Times this week that he was “happy” about Khan's election and that the Muslim mayor could be an exception to his proposed ban.

Khan rejected Trump's exemption, and said he will try to visit the United States before the November presidential election.
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/05/14/465528/Khan-wants-to-educate-Trump-on-Islam-

The emergence of science


The writer is vice-chancellor of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics. He holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford University
Historical accidents have shrouded the emergence of science and the scientific method behind multiple veils of mystery. Misunderstanding the nature of science has led to seriously defective methodologies in modern social science, especially economics. The first barrier to understanding is created by Eurocentric history which states that roots of modern sciences originated with the Greeks. According to this account, the Muslims preserved Greek knowledge, and passed it on to Europe, without making any significant improvements. The Europeans took up the mantle of their Greek ancestors and have since made fantastic progress. The myth that “Europeans are unique in their capacity for rational and scientific thought” has been debunked effectively by many historians, notably Blaut in Eight Eurocentric Historians. Nonetheless, these ideas have been widely propagated, and permeate public consciousness.

Jack Goody in The Theft of History has shown that many inventions of other civilisations were appropriated by European historians and attributed to Europeans to create a Eurocentric history. Even though it is transparently obvious that the flames of the European Enlightenment were lit by sparks from the advanced civilisation of Islamic Spain, one will not find any mention of this in the standard historical accounts. Similarly, conventional histories gloss over the breeding of corn by the master botanists among the Incas (which feeds half the world today), the crucial inventions of papermaking, printing, gunpowder and compass by the Chinese, development of calculus by the Kerala school of mathematicians, and the diverse and extensive contributions of the Islamic civilisation in many fields. Quite apart from the injustice in this distortion of history, this process of negating the Islamic contribution to development of science results in a loss of understanding of the nature and significance of the contribution. If we peel apart the veils of these historical distortions, it becomes crystal clear that science and the scientific method originated in the Islamic civilisation. The discovery of the experimental method by the Muslims was such an important advance on Greek science that it has been termed a conceptual revolution which was “greatest idea of the second millennium”. Our goal is to explain the nature of this advance.

The Greeks originated the first systematic study of Geometry, via the famous axioms of Euclid. The tremendous value and importance of these methods is obvious because these methods are still taught in schools and universities. The purely axiomatic and logical structure of these methods leads to iron-clad certainties which do not require empirical verification. When the Greeks turned to the study of nature, they tried to use the same method that had been so successful. Aristotle argued that induction from observations could be used to frame axioms, but the laws of science must be based on logic, parallel to geometry. Logic reveals grand universal truths, while observations can only reveal lowly ‘contingent truths’ which are valid within a particular historical context under specific circumstances. Richard Powers writes that “the most important idea of this millennium was (due to) Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn ul-Haitham [who] … remains little-known … But the idea that Ibn al-Haytham championed is so ingrained in us that we don’t even think of it as an innovation, let alone one that has appeared so late in the human day.” Greek axioms and logic had led to two rival theories about vision, which had remained deadlocked for 800 years. One way of framing axioms led to the conclusion that light emanated from the eyes and struck the object, while the other led to the reverse conclusion. Ibn-ul-Haitham used observational evidence to definitively settle the matter. For example, he argued that staring at the sun burns the retina, establishing that light travels from the sun to the eyes. His striking innovation was that he made no appeal to theory, axioms or logic. Instead, he demolished a whole mountain of Greek theory with a single appeal to data.

The difference between axiomatic-deductive methodology of the Greeks and scientific methodology developed by Ibn-ul-Haitham and followers is like night and day. This difference can be illustrated and clarified by a wide range of examples. For instance, let us consider the discovery of the atom. Often credited for discovery of the atom, Democritus followed the typical Greek method. He argued that if we kept subdividing matter, we would reach the smallest possible particle, after which no further subdivision would be possible. This was seen as a logical necessity, not as an empirical fact. If viewed experimentally, this logic is deeply flawed. The process of subdivision is constrained by human experimental capabilities, not just the properties of matter. Experimentation and observational evidence have led to knowledge which could never be achieved by axioms and logic. Advances in experimental techniques led to the splitting of atoms, clarifying the structure of matter in ways which were impossible earlier. It was precisely this time-barred and contingent nature of experimental truths which repelled the Greeks.

In contrast to Democritus, Dalton’s discovery of the atom reflects the scientific method. The observation that certain chemicals only combine in fixed proportions, led Dalton to postulate that this was due to properties of the atoms which made up the chemicals. Dalton derived properties of atoms from the observation of a particular fact which was impossible to derive from logic or from intuitive certainties. Similarly, observational evidence about electrons led Niels Bohr to scientific theories which appear logically impossible — that electrons jump from one orbit to another without passing intermediate stages. If economists had imposed their axioms for rational behaviour on electrons, forcing them to behave in a logical manner, we would never have arrived at quantum theory. The essence of the scientific method consists of letting observations guide the construction of theory, regardless of how crazy the theory appears to be logically. Contemporary economic methodology is firmly based on the Greek conception of science and gives primacy to axioms and logic over observations. The mystery of why economists use a pre-scientific methodology and confuse it with science will be resolved later.

The emergence of science,  by Dr Asad Zaman, tribune.com.pk
http://tribune.com.pk/story/1100063/the-emergence-of-science/

Drugs that replace statins but without the side effects approved for use by the NHS

  Statins often come with side affects such as aching muscles
Officials have approved the use of new cholesterol-reducing drugs that are as effective as statins but without the side effects.

Repatha and Praluent are in the vanguard of a new class of treatments that are expected to halve levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol in patients.

Scientists say they promise to save thousands of lives by preventing heart attacks and strokes in patients for whom statins do not work.

Some 325,000 patients could be taking the new drugs within weeks after the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) approved them for use.

They will benefit those with inherited high cholesterol and those with heart disease who cannot cope with the side-effects of statins.

Statins, which are taken by more than seven million people daily in the UK, were developed 30 years ago but are renowned for side-effects such as muscle pain.

It is estimated that up to 20 percent of patients prescribed statins have to stop using the drugs because of muscle pain, leaving them at a high risk of heart attacks or strokes.

In some other patients statins do not work at all.

The new drugs will be self-administered with an injection pen and will be available for around 200,000 people who have symptoms of heart disease and who cannot tolerate statins or for whom statins do not work.

Credit: Telegraph
They will also be available for the roughly 125,000 patients who cannot bring their cholesterol down to a safe level with statins.

Professor Carole Longson, a director at NICE, said: “We are very pleased to be able to recommend alirocumab and evolocumab.

“People with hypercholesterolaemia or mixed dyslipidaemia who have a high risk of a heart attack or stroke despite taking the highest tolerated dose of other cholesterol-lowering drugs, have very few treatment options.

“The committee concluded that both drugs are effective in reducing levels of ‘bad cholesterol’ when compared with placebo, ezetimibe or statins in people with hypercholesterolaemia or mixed dyslipidaemia.

“However, both drugs are relatively expensive, costing over £4,000 per patients per year compared with about £350 for ezetemibe.

“Therefore the draft guidance recommends alirocumab [Praluent] and evolocumab [Rapetha] as a cost effective use of NHS resources only with the discounts agreed with the companies and only for people with hypercholesterolaemia or mixed dyslipidaemia whose cholesterol is still not under control despite making changes to their lifestyle and taking other cholesterol-lowering drugs.”

NHS providers are expected to begin receiving stocks of the new drugs over the next two months and every hospital will be given a further three months before they are obliged to offer the drugs to patients.

Drugs that replace statins but without the side effects approved for use by the NHS
by Henry Bodkin, telegraph.co.uk
http://flip.it/RBO.R

Alf Dubs: ‘Antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism are all equally abhorrent’

The peer who fled the Nazis, aged six, on Labour’s troubles – and his attempts to make the government accept 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees

The public support Lord Dubs received when the Labour peer’s amendment to the immigration bill passed through the Lords in March took him by surprise. “I’ve had people in the street shouting at me, saying well done,” he says. “And you know, when politicians in the street normally get shouted at, it’s with abuse.”

The Dubs amendment to compel the government to take 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Europe – proposed amid reports that some 95,000 refugee children have reached Europe without their parents – was voted down by the Commons last week. But it was immediately revised by the Lords and sent back – to be voted on in the Commons again next week. Dubs says the new amendment, which states that numbers of child refugees will be determined by the government in consultation with councils, has made it “easier for the government to accept”, but the key principle, that Britain should take in unaccompanied, mostly Syrian minors from Europe, remains in place. The government has argued that the UK is already helping refugees in the Middle East, and that accepting vulnerable children from European camps would create a “pull factor”. But Dubs, who arrived in the UK from Czechoslovakia on Kindertransport aged six, disagrees. “There is little evidence to suggest that, but in any case the plight of unaccompanied children in various parts of Europe is so serious that one has to set that off against the possibility that one or two might come as a result of a magnet effect,” he says.

This isn’t the first time Dubs has worked on migration issues – he chaired the Refugee Council for seven years and worked on immigration while on the Labour shadow cabinet front benches during the late 1970s and early 1980s. But he believes that public support for his amendment is significant at a time when resentment and negative sentiment has been stirred around the issue of refugees and migrants across Europe.

“It seems to have got hope to people, that it’s something we could easily do as a country and is important to do,” he says, adding: “British people have good humanitarian instincts. Basically people feel that it’s a rough world, and if we can do something to help a few people, then we should do that.”

A Labour working peer since 1994, the Prague-born Dubs says that he is fighting this case on principle, but in terms of garnering media attention his background has obviously helped. He arrived in Britain in 1939, one of 10,000 children who the UK received as part of the government-backed Kindertransport scheme from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries before the outbreak of the second world war.

Dubs was one of the youngest children and also, he says, luckier than most, because both his parents survived the war: his father was already in Belsize Park, north London, and his mother also eventually escaped – he is not sure how – and joined them in Britain. His father died of a heart attack shortly afterwards, leaving her alone with a child and no money, scrubbing floors and travelling the country for various jobs. She died of leukaemia just after Dubs finished university at the London School of Economics. Years later, he learned that he was one of the 669 children saved from the Nazi regime by Sir Nicholas Winton – the “British Schindler” – and the two became friends.

Dubs says that, steeped in politics at an early age, he quickly realised he wanted to enter this field, because “if evil politicians had caused so much that was dreadful in the world, maybe politics could also be used for good”. Always aligned to the Labour party – “the only way forward” – he was selected as Labour candidate for Battersea South, which he represented until 1987, a post he describes as “a privilege”. There followed a short period out of work – he went to sign on for the dole after losing his seat and wrote “not enough votes” on the form as the reason for his unemployment. After writing a book on how to lobby parliament, to help campaigners and activists, he worked for the Refugee Council, becoming the first refugee director of the organisation, and later for Liberty, as well as other charities and trusts.

It seems that Dubs has always been a thorn in the side of governments, during Labour tenures too. In 2008, while Gordon Brown was prime minister, Dubs refused to approve the government’s attempts to increase the period of detention without charge, from 28 to 42 days.

“The whips asked me four times if I’d support the government and I said no. Then they asked me if I’d take the day off and I said no.” He opposed the Iraq war, though he says that, to this day, he regrets not moving a Lords amendment that declined to support military action in Iraq without endorsement from the UN security council. It wouldn’t have passed, he says, but still: “There was a point of principle about it and a time when it was important to go on the record. I would have felt more at peace with myself if I had played my part”

In the Lords he has fought, among many other things, to make mental health trusts more open, to provide more support for neurological diseases – his son has MS – and in favour of assisted dying. He wants to see an income tax increase hypothecated to the underfunded health service – something he feels the public would support if they knew every penny of the increase was going to the NHS.

He has also been consistently vocal on race relations – during the Brixton riots of the early 1980s he “got into long arguments” about police stop and search, which was disproportionately targeting young black men and which he views as one of the factors causing “understandable resentment”. Still clearly passionate in opposing discrimination of any sort, and at a time when the Labour party has been under fire over antisemitism, Dubs says: “I think antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism are all absolutely and equally abhorrent,” adding: “If I thought the Labour party had a problem with antisemitism, I would leave tomorrow.” He does, however, feel that party leader Jeremy Corbyn began to address the issue “too slowly, and didn’t make a clear enough statement” about it early on.

As for the government, he thinks the current administration is “harsher than the Thatcher government in some ways – the cuts in our services are awful, the cuts in social security support, all these things are a terrible package, where the poor are having to carry the burden”. He was pushing to tackle tax avoidance long before the Panama Papers and still believes this is key – along with opposing austerity measures. The unfairness in our society is much more manifest. How can we have a world with such wealth inequality? It is scandalous – and I shall go on playing my part, to lessen inequality, to work for equality, to oppose discrimination of any sort and to have decent public services.”

As the new amendment on unaccompanied child refugees goes back to the Commons, he remains hopeful that MPs will do the right thing. “Britain is a great country, but I don’t think we are doing a good enough job,” he says. “I keep saying, I’d like other people to have the same opportunities in Britain that I had.”

Alf Dubs: ‘Antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism are all equally abhorrent’
by RACHEL SHABI, theguardian.com
Education Cheadle Hulme school, Cheshire; London School of Economics, BSc politics and economics.
Career 1994 to present: Labour peer, House of Lords; 1997-99: junior minister, Northern Ireland Office; 1994–97: opposition whip; 1988-95: director, Refugee Council; 1979-87: Labour MP, Battersea South (later Battersea); 1983-87: opposition front bench spokesman on home affairs; 1981–83: member, home affairs select committee; 1971-78: member, Westminster city council.

Public life chaired the Fabian Society and Liberty; past trustee of Action Aid and the Immigration Advisory Service.

Interests Walking in the Lake District, tennis, political histories, biographies and thrillers.
http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwvK_3oio

Creation of Israel was ‘a great catastrophe’

Former London mayor Ken Livingstone called the creation of Israel “fundamentally wrong,” and “a great catastrophe.” The existence of the Jewish state in the Middle East, he said, could ultimately lead to nuclear war.

“The creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong, because there had been a Palestinian community there for 2,000 years,” Livingstone told an Arabic language TV station based in London, in a clip posted and translated by the watchdog MEMRI group.

“The creation of the state of Israel was a great catastrophe,” he repeated. “We should have absorbed the post-World War II Jewish refugees in Britain and America. They could all have been resettled, whereas 70 years later, the situation is still very tense, and there is potential for many more wars, potential for nuclear war,” Livingstone told Al-Ghad Al-Arabi.

He also advocated for an international boycott on Israeli products, telling his interviewer that “I never buy anything” that comes from Israel. “I like dates, but I don’t buy dates that come from Israel,” he said.

The former mayor was last week suspended by the Labour party for saying that Hitler supported Zionism “before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews.” He has refused to apologize for the comments and even claimed that previous remarks by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the relationship between the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler supported his argument.

He repeated his claims on Hitler and Zionism on Wednesday, saying that “When Hitler won the elections in 1932 and came to power, his policy was not directed toward killing the Jews. He wanted to deport all the Zionists to Israel [sic].” The State of Israel was created in 1948, three years after the end of the Holocaust.

Livingstone also attributed the mass expulsion of Jews across the Arab world to Israel’s founding.

Prior to the creation of the Jewish state, he said, “there were large Jewish communities that never suffered threats or attacks. They lived in peace alongside their Arab neighbors. But all of this was destroyed with the establishment of the State of Israel, and all the Israeli [sic] communities in the Arab world were deported to Israel.”

The veteran politician also blamed Israel’s ongoing conflict with the Palestinians for global terrorism, including the recent brutal Islamic State attacks in Paris and Brussels.

“I have always believed that the failure to resolve the [Palestinian] problem fuels the terrorist attacks,” he said. “What makes a 15- or 16-year-old boy go and fight with ISIS, or carry out the barbaric attacks that we saw in Paris or Brussels? They don’t do it because they enjoy killing, but because they believe that they are the victims of injustice. The West must deal with the injustice, or will continue to fuel terrorism.”

His latest comments came as Labour struggled to deal with multiple suspensions of members for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic remarks and posts on social media, a scandal that threatens to reduce Jewish support for the party. He was also speaking on the eve of Thursday’s local elections in the UK, in which Labour’s MP Sadiq Khan was seeking to win back the London mayoralty for the party. Britons went to the polls on Thursday to select local leaders across the country, including for London mayor. Khan, a Muslim, is facing off against Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith, who is of partial Jewish ancestry.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/ken-livingstone-creation-of-israel-was-a-great-catastrophe/