Last week, Richard Dawkins delivered a polemic on the British digital TV channel, More 4, against the principle of government support for faith schools. (It is available for viewing at 4 On Demand, although possibly only in the UK.) Faith School Menace set out a number of the most common arguments about why faith schools […]
Yesterday the Daily Star (the Black Hole to you and me), a London tabloid from the same pig-sty as the Daily Express (AKA Daily Spew), ran a story about the “scandal” of the borough of Harrow in north-west London serving up halaal meat in all but one of its ten secondary schools, and from the […]
I was just listening to the BBC London station (94.9FM) and the top story in their news bulletins at the moment seems to be the fact that some Muslim parents are withdrawing their children from music lessons because playing instruments is against Islam. The story isn’t on the BBC News website but is on the […]
This morning, I heard an interview with the woman who had stood to be mayor of Newham, the east London borough, in the most recent local elections (the same day as the general election). Her name is Maria Allen, she stood for the Conservative party and won 16.11% of the vote (doubled from last time, […]
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Last week a number of newspapers reported that scientists were “on track to establish the genetic triggers for autism, paving the way for earlier diagnosis of children who could be at risk of developing the condition and opening up the possibility of inventing new drugs and treatments for the condition”. Personally, “on track” sounds like […]
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Recently I read two blog posts ([1], [2]) about dealing with old “friends” that pop up on Facebook, and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard of it being a problem. There seems to be this tendency that people turn up on Facebook (or Friends Reunited) and ask to be your friend, even though you […]
Last Thursday BBC Radio 4 broadcast a Report programme in which they attempted to “investigate” the links between British university Islamic societies (or ISocs) with terrorism, on the basis that Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, who attempted to blow up a plane near Detroit last Christmas, had been president of the ISoc at University College London. In […]
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Today, the British Supreme Court ruled that the policy of the Jews’ Free School (or JFS) of taking converts to Judaism only when they had been through one denomination’s conversion ritual rather than another was racially discriminatory. The problem was that the school accepted that people who could trace their Jewish ancestry through the maternal […]
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Why Conservatives failed the test on Islamic schools - Education News, Education - The Independent It appears that the Tories overlooked a number of things while criticising state funding for two schools supposedly linked to Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Slough and north London: The most obvious mistake was the allegation that they appeared not to have been […]
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Most UK crime caused by people with childhood behavioural problems, study says | Society | The Guardian I was quite worried when I saw this headline, and was reassured to read on and find that it was all about early intervention to make sure that children who were continually behaving badly were led back to […]
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School teacher Helen Goddard jailed for 15 months for lesbian affair with teenage pupil | Mail Online A judge yesterday jailed a (now former) music teacher for fifteen months for carrying on a lesbian affair with a 15-year-old pupil at a posh girls’ private school in London. The affair involved stays at the teacher’s house […]
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I’ve had a camcorder since last Christmas, which I used to shoot footage of the Palestine rally in January. I had intended to use it to do video blogs and perhaps interviews, but haven’t got round to it until now. Well, last week I posted a 20-minute video blog (in three sections as YouTube doesn’t […]
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Comprehensive defends new school uniform costing nearly £100 | Education | The Guardian On the subject of Portsmouth, one imagines that you will not find much overlap between the riders on the new London-to-Portsmouth Greyhound I mentioned in my last entry and the clientele at this state comprehensive school in the outlying Hampshire town of […]
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I’ve not long finished watching a BBC Storyville documentary (see it on iPlayer here) on the scientist D. Carleton Gajdusek (pronounced Guy-du-shek), who won a Nobel prize for work on prion diseases (such as the notorious mad cow disease) who was later convicted of molesting young boys. Gajdusek imported dozens of boys from various Pacific […]
Why are the authorities refusing to fund France’s oldest Muslim school, now facing bankruptcy? | Education | The Guardian Today’s Guardian Education supplement on how bigots in a north Paris education authority are using bureaucratic methods to deny a Muslim school funding, forcing it to the verge of bankruptcy. Despite the supposedly strict separation of […]
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