Dr. Qasim Rasool Ilyas was elected president of the Welfare Party of India floated by the Jamaat e Islami Hind. He is the General Secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and editor of Urdu journal Afkaar e Milli. A PhD in chemistry from Nagpur University, Dr. Ilyas has been a member of the Jamaat e Islami Hind since long and is an active social worker in Delhi. He took over after former President Mujtaba Farooq resigned from the post.

Joins BJP: Abdul Azeem, former Member of the Legislative Council representing Janata Dal-Secular quit the party and joined the BJP. This is the second time he has quit JDS. He was assistant commissioner of police in Bangalore and earned fame as a super-detective. He contested unsuccessfully from Hebbal Assembly constituency in the City during 2013 elections. The seat was won by the BJP as presence of Congress candidate, a grandson of veteran politician Jaffer Sharief split the dominant minority votes.

AMUSU office-bearers:
Abdullah Al-Azam was elected the president of the Aligarh Muslim University Students Union. He is a fourth year law student. He defeated his closest rival Liyaqath Khan with a margin of 671 votes in a four-cornered contest. Syed Masoodul Hassan was elected the vice president. He is student of Mass Communiction. Shahzeb Ahmad has been elected the General Secretary. Thirteen others were elected for the Students Union Cabinet. In separately held elections for the Women’s College, Gulfiza Khan was elected president while Noor Ain Batool and Afra Khanum were elected vice president and General secretary for the Women’s College Students Union.
JandK Doctor: A team of Harvard scientists headed by Indian-American scientist Dr. Khalid Shah has discovered a novel way to fight deadly brain cancer with toxin-resistant stem cells. Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital led by Jammu and Kashmir experimented on mice and used genetically engineered stem cells that released cancer-killing toxins while leaving healthy cells unaffected, said Stem Cells journal published by the Institute.

Arvind Mayaram has been brought in as the Secretary for the Ministry for Minority Welfare in the Central Secretariat. He was Secretary Finance Ministry till October 16 and was transferred to Tourism Ministry on October 16. He was to assume charge of Secretary Tourism on October 31 but Lalith Panwar was brought in to the post.

Young Afghan activist Hasina Jalal wins 2014 N-Peace Award
Hasina Jalal, a founding member of the National Association of Afghanistan Civil Society and board member of Freedom Message Newspaper is one of the five young women in Asia who recently won the 2014 N-Peace Award. She was recognized as the winner in the category of Public Vote for Untold Stories-Women Transforming their Communities.
Other winners in the same category were from Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.
In winning the award, Hasina demonstrated that young women in Afghanistan are capable of contributing to peace and development despite the many social, economic and political obstacles and the enormous threats to their security.
In the culture of Afghanistan, a young women like Hasina is not expected to play active roles in public life, much less become an activist.
Hasina’s focus is to help raise the voices of young women through her leadership in education and training of youth, promoting partnerships and collaboration among women’s groups, advocacy, and capacity building of non-profit organizations.
She works to bring together the voices of people who are being marginalized by violence, poverty, and isolation.As co-founder and board member of the Afghani weekly Freedom Message Newspaper, an activist tabloid that exposes abuses of women’s rights and promotes freedom of expression, tolerance and understanding of democratic principles and laws on human rights, Hasina encourages women in communities to write their news and opinions about their lives.
Through speeches and direct engagement with the people, Hasina amplifies the clamor for attention to the lives of people who have less in life. She is a real inspiration to the next generation of women leaders in the country. (www.khaama.com)

Kalthoum Kannou, Tunisia’s First Woman Presidential Candidate
Judge Kalthoum Kannou has recently made history as the first female presidential candidate in modern-day Tunisia, marking yet another milestone for the “cradle” of the Arab Spring country.
A judge in the Court of Cassation, the highest court in the Tunisian judiciary system chiefly responsible for verifying the interpretation of the law, Kannou is Tunisia’s first woman to seek a post higher than that of a parliamentarian.
Aiming to be the world’s first “Tunisian, Arab, Muslim, female president,” Kannou was able to garner more than 15,000 nominations from across the country while fielding her candidacy and is currently touring Tunisia for her electoral campaign competing against 24 men.
Born on the east coastal islands of Karkna in 1959, just three years after Tunisia’s independence from French colonial rule, Kannou grew up learning how to fight for her rights from her father, Mabrouk Kannou, a known member of the Tunisian General Labor Union.
Kannou earned a law degree from the Universite de Tunis in the capital to quickly become frontrunner in the battle for an independent judiciary and a fierce critic of corruption that marked the longstanding regime of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
As a result of her outspokenness, the former Ben Ali government continuously used coercive measures to silence Kannou such as banning her from traveling, denying her promotions, cutting her salary, tapping her phone, and assigning her to courts in remote areas in the southern region although she spent most of her career in the capital. Putting her 25-year career as a judge aside, Kannou is also a mother of three and is married to a physician.
But it wasn’t until the Islamist Ennahda party started calling for a “consensus president” as a political solution for Tunisia’s political deadlock in June this year that Kannou decided to step forward as a non-partisan, independent candidate and filed her candidacy in mid-July ““ a move that surprised many Tunisians.
Tunisian intellectuals see her candidacy as “symbolic” and “historic” for a country already known as the Arab world’s most progressive in terms of women’s rights. Tunisians head to the ballot box again on Nov. 23.
(http://english.alarabiya.net/en/)

Yusuf Islam picks up Guitar Again: Singer and musician Yusuf Islam (previously Cat Stevens) has picked up the guitar again and is beginning a world tour. The 66-year old had given up singing four decades ago. Born in London and living in Dubai, Yusuf recently told the media: Listen to me, this is part of Islamic civilization. We have lost contat with it, we lost our vibrant approach to life and to culture.” He will be belting out songs from his new album ““ The blusy “Tell ‘Em I,m Gone””as well as classics from his 1960s and 1970s heyday such as “Wild World”, “Moonshadow”, and “Peace Train”.