Indigo Jo on September 1st, 2010

Earlier today I watched the Dispatches programme, Britain’s Secret Slaves (in the UK, you can watch it on their 4oD service), about the mistreatment of domestic workers in the UK. The first half, roughly, dealt with campaigners who try to get back passports that the workers’ former employers were holding on to, while they insist […]

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Continue reading about Seize their buildings

Indigo Jo on August 27th, 2010

France’s ban on the Islamic veil has little to do with female emancipation | Law | guardian.co.uk Joan Wallach Scott, the author of The Politics of the Veil, on the real motivation behind the move to ban the niqaab in France: The national assembly’s action came on July 13, as the country prepared to celebrate […]

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Continue reading about France niqaab ban “not meant to help women”

Indigo Jo on August 25th, 2010

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 […]

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Continue reading about Faith schools are no menace

Indigo Jo on August 15th, 2010

This is something I got through a tweet from 5CC or Tabloid Watch, but Osama Saeed jogged my memory about it. An election campaign card which was used by Phil Woolas during his (successful) campaign against the Lib Dems in Oldham in May has just come to light in which he claims that the Lib […]

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Continue reading about Let in immigrants, get extremists

Indigo Jo on July 31st, 2010

Yesterday it was reported that Ian Huntley, the man convicted of the murder of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham (a village near Cambridge, in England) in 2002 and who was attacked by a repeat robber who attempted to cut his throat is planning to sue the Prison Service for failing to protect […]

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Continue reading about Crime victims’ groups round on crime victim

Indigo Jo on July 27th, 2010

The past few days have seen one ghoulish story about Jon Venables (or the person formerly known as such), one of the two boys who murdered a toddler, James Bulger, on Merseyside in February 1993. The latest one concerns the weight he’s allegedly piled on by gorging on snack foods in his supposedly luxurious secure […]

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Continue reading about Tabloid feeding frenzy over Venables

Indigo Jo on July 22nd, 2010

Dr Rob, an American primary care doctor (or GP), recently published a “letter to patients with chonic disease”, quite an interesting article in which he informs them that doctors are actually scared of them because they remind the doctors of the limitations of what they can do, and because they often come on too strong: […]

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Continue reading about Doctors scare chronically sick patients too

Indigo Jo on July 20th, 2010

This didn’t quite come too late for yesterday’s entry on niqaab, but that was dragging on too long and I had an appointment this morning that I should have been preparing for while I was writing it. However, there was a story that the Syrian government had banned women from wearing niqaab while in universities […]

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Continue reading about Muslim country bans niqaab shock!

Indigo Jo on July 19th, 2010

This morning Vanessa Feltz, the host of the BBC London morning phone-in show, had among her topics the question of whether the so-called burqa should be banned (you can listen to it, if you’re in the UK, here until next Monday). She had a couple of other topics, but it seems the phone was buzzing […]

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Continue reading about Nessie allows bigoted ‘debate’ about niqaab

Indigo Jo on July 18th, 2010

Last week I heard an awful lot of nonsense in the media about why there were so many people willing to sing the praises of the murderer Raoul Moat, who killed his ex-girlfriend’s partner (believing him to be a policeman), shot the ex-girlfriend and a police officer, blinding the latter, before going on the run […]

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Continue reading about Raoul Moat: just a thug

Indigo Jo on July 11th, 2010

Last week it was reported that the coalition government is to go ahead with plans to change the law to give men accused of rape the right to anonymity up to the point where they are charged. There actually was anonymity for rape defendants from 1976 (when it was introduced by a Labour government) until […]

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Continue reading about Why no compromise on rape anonymity?

Indigo Jo on July 10th, 2010

ButYouDontLookSick.com is a website by a woman with lupus (she wrote the Spoon Theory I referred to in a previous post). In her biography, she says that, despite suffering a wide range of symptoms over the years, she had been told by “well-wishers and doctors alike”, “but you don’t look sick”. The story I saw […]

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Continue reading about Which of these women looks sick?

Indigo Jo on July 4th, 2010

A few months ago I read a book called Living Dolls by Natasha Walter, who argued that the “new feminism” she thought was emerging in the 1990s had given way to a culture in which girls were being pressurised to be sexualised at younger and younger ages, with anyone resisting being seen as a prude, […]

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Continue reading about A new light on the harms of porn

Indigo Jo on July 1st, 2010

Lost Voices is published by Invest in ME, a British charity which concentrates on promoting research into the causes of, and a possible cure for, the debilitating neurological disease, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME); they have organised conferences in London addressed by the major scientists involved in such research, mostly from the USA. I ordered the book […]

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Continue reading about Review: Lost Voices

Indigo Jo on June 29th, 2010

Yesterday a branch of Barclays bank was robbed near London. It happened in Ashford — not the one in Kent where the Eurostar trains stop, but the quiet suburban sprawl north of Staines which is right next to Heathrow airport. The robber made everyone dress in boilersuits so that they would all look like him, […]

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Continue reading about Suburban Barclays bank robbed

Indigo Jo on June 19th, 2010

Yesterday, the Guardian printed previously unseen pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi, the one-time Burmese democracy leader, at various points both in Asia in her youth and in the UK as a married woman, all before she returned to Burma in 1988, initially to care for her mother but she ended up forming a political […]

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Continue reading about Aung San Suu Kyi and futility

Indigo Jo on June 16th, 2010

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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Continue reading about Uniforms more important than school meals?

Indigo Jo on June 8th, 2010

Student kicked out of class because of her hair product? This article got flagged up on Facebook: an African-American schoolgirl was kicked out of class by a white teacher in Seattle because her hair was “sickening” because of the hair product the girl used. It looks like some people are trying to make a race […]

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Continue reading about When your cosmetics make others ill

Indigo Jo on May 24th, 2010

Earlier today, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in the Lancet, a major British medical journal suggesting that the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) might be a cause of autism, was struck off the British medical register by the General Medical Council, which found him guilty of serious professional misconduct. The […]

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Continue reading about Wakefield, vaccines and ME

Indigo Jo on May 18th, 2010

I was directed by Islamophobia Watch to an article on Normblog taking apart Christopher Hitchen’s arguments on the Slate website in favour of banning the niqaab in France and elsewhere. The Belgian parliament has already approved a ban, the French parliament is debating it (although the prospect of Arab divestment and the likelihood of it […]

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Continue reading about Norman Geras demolishes Hitchens on niqab ban (partly)