Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will...Knowledge is power....
Bismillahirahmanirrahim....
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Organization's progress in achieving the objectives of its Strategic Plan is routinely evaluated by both internal and external organizations. The Government Performance and Results requires Federal agencies to submit annual performance plans following the transmittal to Congress of the President's budget. Organization's performance report will reflect the performance goals against which the Agency expects its effectiveness to be measured in any given fiscal year.
Strategic Planning establishes the direction for all Agency efforts and forms the basis for strategic and tactical decisionmaking, resource allocation, and capital investment. It does so in the context of the Agency's vision, mission, goals, objectives, values, and policies, as well as external and internal environments. The Strategic Planning process requires alignment among Strategic Plan, the Enterprise Strategic Plans, programs, and institutional capabilities
The wakalah concept is essentially an agent-principal relationship, where the takaful operator acts as an agent on behalf of the participants and earns a fee for services rendered. The fee can be a fixed amount or based on an agreed ratio of investment profit or surplus of the takaful funds.
Under the mudharabah contract, the takaful oprtaor acts as a mudharib (entrepreneur) and the participants as rabbul mal (Capital providers). The contract specifies how the surplus from the takaful operations is to be shared between the takaful operator and the participants. Looses are borne by the participants as the capital providers. However, to protect the interest of the participants, the takaful operator is required to observe prudential rules including provision of interest-free loans by the operato to the takaful risk funds in the event that there is a deficiency in the takaful risk funds.
Source: Malaysia International Islamic Financial Centre (MIFC)
In line with international and local developments in the practice of Islamic financial protection services, Takaful IKHLAS has adopted the Wakalah contract as our system and have modelled our operations accordingly. Wakalah is a form of representative relationship between Takaful IKHLAS and a participant (Principal/Customer).
Takaful IKHLAS employs the following contracts to govern our business:
Tabarru’ is a contract where the participant agrees to donate a pre-determined percentage of contribution to the Risk Fund to provide assistance to fellow participants.
Wakalah is a contract where the participant authorises Takaful IKHLAS to conduct the affairs of Takaful business i.e providing protection, investment etc. on his/her behalf.
Takaful IKHLAS Model allows the use of intermediaries as a medium to better serve the customers’ needs, payment of surpluses and profits, where applicable to participants and calculation of shared benefits on a monthly basis.
Note: For General Takaful, all contributions, net of Expense Fund (EF), in the GRIA is dripped for Tabarru' at the onset into the Risk Fund (RF) and Special Fund (SF). Any investment income in the Risk Fund (RF) and Special Fund (SF) shall be allocated back into the Risk Fund (RF) and Special Fund (SF), respectively. In this instance, IKHLAS will not charge an investment Performance Fee (%). Net surplus distribution will be allocated and administered on an annual basis
By Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada
Five years ago, I wrote a column about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my article, they knew nothing of the 1932—33 genocide in which Stalin's regime murdered 7 million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps.
How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many young North-American Ukrainians? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history's black hole.
So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the Soviets in the 1920's, and Volga Germans, in 1941; and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalin's gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.
Almost unknown is the genocide of 2 million of the USSR's Muslim peoples: Chechen, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkir, Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters today branded "terrorists" by the US and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.
Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945—47 of at least 2 million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which 2 million German girls and women were raped.
Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people. In 1932 he sent Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch, and NKVD secret police chief G. Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization
Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed "anti-party elements." Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch "the Soviet Adolf Eichmann" set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.
During the bitter winter of 1932—33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or dying of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergan-Belsen death camp.
The mass murder of 7 million Ukrainians, 3 million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of 2 million (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like the New York Times' Walter Duranty, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform." Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."
The US, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically, Hitler and Mussolini. Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and many senior communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across fearful Europe.
When war came, Roosevelt and Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler's extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.
Though Stalin murdered 3 times more people than Hitler, to the doting Roosevelt he remained "Uncle Joe." At Yalta, Stalin even boasted to Churchill he had killed over 10 million peasants. The British-US alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime. Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve history's most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of Europe.
After the war, the Left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre denied the gulag even existed. For the Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit being allied to mass murders. For the Soviets, promoting the Jewish Holocaust perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their own crimes.
The Jewish people saw their Holocaust as a unique event. It was Israel's raison d'être. Raising other genocides would, they feared, diminish their own.
While academia, media and Hollywood rightly keep attention on the Jewish Holocaust, they ignore Ukraine. We still hunt Nazi killers but not communist killers. There are few photos of the Ukraine genocide or Stalin's gulag, and fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no tales.
Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.
We know all about crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.
But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria? Were it not for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma, and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.
The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.
In an interview in the Saudi Gazette, Dr. Faten Abdel-Rahman Khorshid states Nano-particles in camel urine may help treat cancer.
After spending more than five years in lab research, this Saudi scientist and faculty member from King Abdul Aziz University (KAAU) and President of the Tissues Culture Unit at King Fahd Center for Medical Research, has discovered that nano-particles in the urine of camels can attack cancer cells with success. Her work began with experiments involving camel urine, cancer cells found in patients’ lungs and culminated in injecting mice with leukemic cancel cells and camel urine to test the results. Speaking to the Saudi Gazette, Dr. Khorshid claimed that she was inspired by Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) medical advice and that camel urine consists of natural substances that work to eradicate malignant cells and maintain the number of healthy cells in a cancer patient. “This treatment is not an invention, but rather, taken from our Prophet’s legacy,” she remarked. A Hadith narrated by Al-Bukhari (2855) and Muslim (1671) claims that some people came to Madina and fell ill with bloated abdomens. The Prophet (pbuh) told them to combine the milk and urine of a camel and drink that, after which they recovered. A swollen abdomen may indicate edema, liver disease or cancer. Dr. Khorshid added that she is not a medical doctor but a scientist and her job involves the preparation and testing of a drug in the lab and supervising the manufacture, testing and application of the drug. “We have researched and studied (camel urine) for seven years, during which we have tested the effectiveness of camel urine in fighting cancer to prerequisites set by the International Cancer Institute,” she explained. According to her published study on the subject, the clinical trial her team conducted on patients indicated that the medicine (capsules and syrup) did not entail any harmful side effects. In the case of a volunteer patient with lung cancer, the medicine helped in halving the size of the tumor after only one month. The patient, and others like him, are still undergoing treatment. Heeding the advice found in the Hadith, Dr. Khorshid is combining specific amounts of camel milk and urine to develop her medicine and focuses on particular types of cancer, including lung cancer, blood cancer, stomach cancer, colon cancer, brain tumors and breast cancer.
She added that she advises all of her volunteer patients to use fresh camel milk and urine with the two components given individually for a period of time and then combined together later. Other illnesses, including vitiligo (depigmentation in certain areas of the skin), eczema and psoriasis (an autoimmune disease which affects the skin and joints). However, Dr. Khorshid adds that she will only dispense this medicine to patients on a non-voluntary basis when pharmaceutical companies obtain a license to do so. Currently, the medication is still undergoing tests
In an effort to prove the miracle of camel urine Muslims cite this article from the BBC: Scientists from the United Arab Emirates have proposed using one of the world's hardiest mammals - the camel - in the campaign to fight and eradicate human diseases. Dead cattle in Cumbria Camels are free from viruses such as foot and mouth A team led by Dr Sabah Jassim, from the Zayed Complex for Herbal Research and Traditional Medicine, says camels are highly resistant to many deadly viral diseases and believes their antibodies could be used for new drugs.
Natural immunity
But as well as these advantages, they have immune systems that are so robust. They remain free from many of the viral diseases that affect other mammals, such as foot-and-mouth and rinderpest.
The antibodies that camels carry inside them are structurally much simpler than those of humans, and Dr Sabah Jassim suggests they could be much simpler to replicate artificially than human antibodies.
Writing in the British Institute of Biology's magazine, The Biologist, Dr Jassim says the small size of camel antibodies would also allow them to penetrate deep into human tissue and cells that would not be otherwise accessible.
He said the camel antibodies, by being transported from the desert sands into the laboratory test tube, had the potential to be a vital weapon against human diseases
Muhammad prescribed camel urine as medicine to the followers from uraynah. Because Muhammed is a prophet, Muslims believe he received a divine revelation from God. As a result they continue to study and prescribe camel urine as medicine despite the lack of evidence proving there is any medicinal value in camel urine and that there is some evidence that drinking urine is actually harmful
In the Holy Quran, God speaks about the stages of man’s embryonic development.
We created man from an extract of clay. Then We made him as a drop in a place of settlement, firmly fixed. Then We made the drop into an alaqah (leech, suspended thing, and blood clot), then We made the alaqah into a mudghah (chewed substance)... 1 (Quran, 23:12,23:13,12:14)
The second meaning of the word alaqah is “suspended thing.” This is what we can see in figures 2 and 3, the suspension of the embryo, during the alaqah stage, in the womb of the mother. The third meaning of the word alaqah is “blood clot.” We find that the external appearance of the embryo and its sacs during the alaqah stage is similar to that of a blood clot. This is due to the presence of relatively large amounts of blood present in the embryo during this stage4 (see figure 4). Also during this stage, the blood in the embryo does not circulate until the end of the third week.5 Thus, the embryo at this stage is like a clot of blood. The next stage mentioned in the verse is the mudghah stage. The Arabic word mudghah means “chewed substance.” If one were to take a piece of gum and chew it in his or her mouth and then compare it with an embryo at the mudghah stage, we would conclude that the embryo at the mudghah stage acquires the appearance of a chewed substance. This is because of the somites at the back of the embryo that “somewhat resemble teethmarks in a chewed substance.”6 (see figures 5 and 6).
How could Muhammad have possibly known all this 1400 years ago, when scientists have only recently discovered this using advanced equipment and powerful microscopes which did not exist at that time? Hamm and Leeuwenhoek were the first scientists to observe human sperm cells (spermatozoa) using an improved microscope in 1677 (more than 1000 years after Muhammad ). They mistakenly thought that the sperm cell contained a miniature preformed human being that grew when it was deposited in the female genital tract.7
Professor Emeritus Keith L. Moore8 is one of the world’s most prominent scientists in the fields of anatomy and embryology and is the author of the book entitled The Developing Human, which has been translated into eight languages. This book is a scientific reference work and was chosen by a special committee in the United States as the best book authored by one person. Dr. Keith Moore is Professor Emeritus of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. There, he was Associate Dean of Basic Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine and for 8 years was the Chairman of the Department of Anatomy. In 1984, he received the most distinguished award presented in the field of anatomy in Canada, the J.C.B. Grant Award from the Canadian Association of Anatomists. He has directed many international associations, such as the Canadian and American Association of Anatomists and the Council of the Union of Biological Sciences.
In 1981, during the Seventh Medical Conference in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, Professor Moore said: “It has been a great pleasure for me to help clarify statements in the Quran about human development. It is clear to me that these statements must have come to Muhammad from God, because almost all of this knowledge was not discovered until many centuries later. This proves to me that Muhammad must have been a messenger of God.”9 (To view the RealPlayer video of this comment click here ).
Consequently, Professor Moore was asked the following question: “Does this mean that you believe that the Quran is the word of God?” He replied: “I find no difficulty in accepting this.”10
During one conference, Professor Moore stated: “....Because the staging of human embryos is complex, owing to the continuous process of change during development, it is proposed that a new system of classification could be developed using the terms mentioned in the Quran and Sunnah (what Muhammad said, did, or approved of). The proposed system is simple, comprehensive, and conforms with present embryological knowledge. The intensive studies of the Quran and hadeeth (reliably transmitted reports by the Prophet Muhammad’s companions of what he said, did, or approved of) in the last four years have revealed a system for classifying human embryos that is amazing since it was recorded in the seventh century A.D. Although Aristotle, the founder of the science of embryology, realized that chick embryos developed in stages from his studies of hen’s eggs in the fourth century B.C., he did not give any details about these stages. As far as it is known from the history of embryology, little was known about the staging and classification of human embryos until the twentieth century. For this reason, the descriptions of the human embryo in the Quran cannot be based on scientific knowledge in the seventh century. The only reasonable conclusion is: these descriptions were revealed to Muhammad from God. He could not have known such details because he was an illiterate man with absolutely no scientific training.”
He sends down water from the skies, and the channels flow, each according to its measure: But the torrent bears away to foam that mounts up to the surface. Even so, from that (ore) which they heat in the fire, to make ornaments or utensils therewith, there is a scum likewise. Thus doth Allah (by parables) show forth Truth and Vanity. For the scum disappears like forth cast out while that which is for the good of mankind remains on the earth. Thus doth Allah set forth para- bles. (Ar Rad: 17)
2004 Scientific evidence regarding New Frontiers Nanoporous gold foam is an example of a material that can be synthesized with engineered properties. Creating the foam with pores less than 100 nm through dealloying opens the possibility for many applications. For example, nanoporous gold foam could be used for research on surfaceenhanced Raman spectroscopy. Currently, gold and silver nanoparticles help to enhance Raman scattering, and more recently, the use of gold nanoshells has been shown to significantly further increase the Raman scattering. The study of nanoporous foam as Raman enhancers and their comparison to nanoshells presents an interesting and technologically challenging project that could impact both the medical and scientific fields. Nanoporous foam could also be potentially used as actuators. Recently, a nanoporous platinum material demonstrated the basis for the first metal actuator, and many other applications are expected to arise for metallic actuators as new research becomes available.
This one of the scietific discovery the truth about Quran....let us be the foam that can contribute towards mankind dont be like the water bubble foam that easily wipe out from the sky....
