Family Entertainment Blog

Two million Muslims are now living in the UK, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith revealed yesterday.

The milestone total includes 10,000 millionaires, she said during a visit to Pakistan to discuss counter-terrorism.
It means the Islamic population in the UK has increased by 400,000 since the 2001 census - adding more than 50,000 to the total each year.
Miss Smith told the Pakistan National Council of the Arts: “After Christianity, Islam is the largest faith community in the UK.
“1.6million declared themselves Muslims in the 2001 census, and that figure may now be as high as 2million. Islam is one of many faiths which are practised in UK communities.
“We are proud to live in such a diverse country.
“Muslims play a full and active part in British society: in politics, from Parliament to local government, in the armed forces, policing, the professions, the arts and sports, and of course in business.”
The Home Secretary said she wants Britain’s universities to “provide high quality learning about faith and Islam and to establish the UK as centre of excellence outside the Islamic world for Islamic studies”.
She repeated the Government’s new position there is no such thing as “Islamic terrorism”, telling the audience: “Terrorism has no place in Islamic thought, teaching or tradition. It is the opposite of everything that Islam stands for: Peace, Tolerance and Obedience to God.

“The ideology promoted by terrorists is a perverse rewriting of history and politics, and a misreading of a great religion.”

But Miss Smith said that terrorist plots in the UK had been traced back to Pakistan, and also that the terrorist threat to Pakistan had links to the UK.

She called on the people of both countries to play their part by rejecting the terrorists’ ideology, and isolating those who support them.

The Home Secretary added: “The majority has to speak out against the terrorist world view; challenge their image; call to account advocates of violence extremism; protect our institutions; and support those who are most at risk. But to do all this the majority has to make itself stronger, more articulate and outspoken, more challenging.”

Last month, the Vatican’s newspaper reported that Islam had overtaken Roman Catholicism to become the world’s largest single religious denomination.

In an interview with the paper Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, compilier of the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican yearbook, said: “For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us.”

He said that figures for 2006 showed that Catholics accounted for 17.4 per cent of the world population while Muslims accounted for 19.2 per cent
daily

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teenagers with a bedroom television tend to have poorer diet and exercise habits and lower grades in school than those without one, U.S. researchers said on Monday.While many studies have examined TV viewing habits of young people, researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health said little had been known about the consequences in particular for older adolescents of having a bedroom TV.

They questioned 781 adolescents, ages 15 to 18, in the Minneapolis area in 2003 and 2004. Of them, 62 percent reported having a television in their bedroom.

Not surprisingly, those with a bedroom TV were more apt to watch it a lot, clocking four to five more hours in front of a television per week, the researchers said. Twice as many of the teens with a bedroom TV were classified as heavy TV watchers — at least five hours a day — compared to those without one.

Girls with a bedroom television reported getting less vigorous exercise — 1.8 hours per week compared to 2.5 hours for girls without a TV. They also ate fewer vegetables, drank more sweetened beverages and ate meals with their family less often, the researchers said.

Boys with a bedroom TV reported having a lower grade point average than boys without one, as well as eating less fruit and having fewer family meals, the researchers said.

“It really clearly points out that there’s some merit to not allowing your child to have a TV in the bedroom,” said Daheia Barr-Anderson, one of the researchers.

“When you upgrade your TV in the living room and you have this smaller TV that’s out of date but still usable, parents should really resist putting it in one of your children’s bedrooms — and resist the pressure from the child to have a TV in their bedroom,” she said in a telephone interview.

SURPRISE ON OBESITY

The American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents to remove TV sets from children’s bedrooms, the researchers noted. The findings were published in the academy’s journal Pediatrics.

Boys were more likely to have a television in their bedroom than girls — 68 percent versus 58 percent.

Teens from the highest income families were far less likely than those from all other income levels to have a bedroom TV, the survey found.

Among black teens, 82 percent reported having a bedroom TV, compared to 66 percent of Hispanics, 60 percent of whites and 39 percent of Asian Americans.

The researchers tracked body mass index — a measure based on height and weight — and found that having a bedroom TV had no influence on whether teens were obese.

Barr-Anderson said that finding was a surprise, considering that previous studies looking at younger children — one on elementary school kids and one on low-income preschoolers — found that having a bedroom TV was an even stronger predictor of obesity than the time spent watching TV.

Both boys and girls with a bedroom TV reported spending less time reading and doing homework, although the researchers said the differences were not statistically significant.

She might have a penchant for fast food - but it’s certainly hard to tell from these photos of Wag Abbey Clancy, as she struck a series of typically raunchy poses for a new ad campaign.

The model girlfriend of lanky footballer Peter Crouch is the star of a new campaign for men’s deodorant range Lynx.

And she’s bound to set their pulses racing with this series of raunchy shots
Model Abbey famously turned her back on fame and fortune in the US to stay in England with her footballer boyfriend.
US model agencies were falling over each other to sign Abbey after she appeared in her Living TV reality series last year — Abbey & Janice: Beauty and the Best.

But the 22-year-old said she could not stay in America because she would miss her Liverpool footballer boyfriend Crouch too much.
She even turned to cheeseburgers, comfort eating because of the separation. Abbey told The Sun: “I got really homesick and missed Peter like mad.
“I had a breakdown and I comforted myself by scoffing cheeseburgers.”

Abbey and Crouch, 27, are said to be “head over heels in love” living together in footballer’s haven, Alderly Edge, Cheshire.

Although her ambition had been to be a successful underwear model, smitten Abbey revealed: “Obviously I really love modelling and I’d love to make it big.
“But it’s not a decision which can be made overnight and my life is fulfilled with my relationship — my modelling career is a bonus.

She added: “I’m happy with Peter and that’s enough for me.”

And no doubt he’s quite happy with her!

LUCKNOW, India - Conservationists and scientists scrambled Tuesday to determine what has killed at least 50 critically endangered crocodile-like reptiles in recent weeks in a river sanctuary in central India.
Everything from parasites to pollution has been blamed for the deaths of the gharials — massive reptiles that look like their crocodile relatives, but with long slender snouts. The bodies, measuring between five and 10 feet long, have been found washed up on the banks of the Chambal River since early December, according to conservationists and officials.

The precise number of gharials that have died remains unclear, with the Gharial Conservation Alliance saying 81 bodies have been found since early December, butt Chief Wildlife Warden D.N.S Suman putting the number of dead animals at 50. Conservationists believe there are only some 1,500 gharials left in the wild, many of them in a sanctuary based along the Chambal,
 

one of the few unpolluted Indian rivers. The Chambal contains the largest of three breeding populations in the world.

In early December, officials found the bodies of at least 21 gharials over three days. The bodies have continued washing ashore in the weeks since.

The latest possible clue to what’s killing the rare reptiles is an unknown parasite that scientists found in the dead gharials’ liver and kidneys, according to Dr. A.K. Sharma of the Indian Veterinary Research Institute.

“We can say that liver and kidney of these gharials were badly damaged,” said Sharma. “They were swollen and bigger than their usual size.”

Other believe the gharials may have gotten sick and died after eating contaminated fish from the polluted Yamuna river, which joins the Chambal in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Pathological tests confirmed lead and cadmium in the bodies of the dead gharials, said Suman, the wildlife official.

“The Chambal river has clear water free from heavy metals. The only possibility seems that these gharials might have migrated from heavily polluted Yamuna river where they might have eaten fish,” said Suman.

The gharial, also known as the Indian crocodile, was on the verge of extinction in the 1970s, but a government breeding program that has released several hundred into the wild has raised their numbers.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Chelsea Clinton says she passionately believes in her mother.

She says she believes in Senator Hillary Clinton as a daughter, as a young woman and as a Democrat. She made the remarks Wednesday at the University of Notre Dame, marking her third straight day speaking at colleges in Indiana on behalf of her mother’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. She started the trip Monday in South Bend with her father, former President Bill Clinton.

Chelsea Clinton answered questions on subjects from the war to the housing crisis to health care. She says she believes it’s immoral in the United States that people without health care are more likely to die. More than 500 people attended the event at Notre Dame