The Xinhua News Agency reported on Friday 18th January that Ma Jiantang, director of China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), called for the country's one-child policy to be changed because of the nation's shrinking pool of workers. According to the NBS, the working-age population in China decreased by 3.45 million between 2011 and 2012. In October 2011, the China Development Research Foundation, a think-tank affiliated with the Chinese government, also…

On 16 December a 23-year-old paramedic student was raped on a moving bus in Delhi, by six heavily drunk men who brutalized and tortured the victim for about an hour, and then threw her out from the moving bus. After struggling for her life in a Singapore hospital for many days, she succumbed to her injuries and died. The incident has triggered a tsunami of protests not just in the…

It is common now in Pakistan that a shortage of natural gas persists through out the year, but as the bitterly cold winter months arrive, it takes the form of a severe gas crisis. At the moment across the country, industry has been notified that their gas will be suspended for an indefinite period, causing many job losses to the order of hundreds of thousands and billions of Rupees losses…

A few days ago, on a Wednesday, I was contacted by a family friend who is a convert to Islam. They wanted me to meet their friend who wanted to embrace Islam on Friday but had some final questions. So we arranged for me to meet the brother before Zuhr salah at the masjid on Thursday. We sat at the back of the masjid before salah and started discussing. I…