Afghan gas attacks weren’t hysteria after all
From the New York Times: Blood tests have confirmed that a mysterious series of cases of mass sickness at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful...
Author: Matthew Smith
Getting drawn back into Eastenders
Last week I stopped watching EastEnders (this is a BBC soap opera set in a fictional mostly white east end of London, without any Bengalis or Somalis) because I finally became exasperated with how...
Spectator forced to apologise to Islam Expo
Inayat Bunglawala drew our attention yesterday to an apology published in the Spectator, a British right-wing political magazine (a tedious rag where people flaunt whatever privilege and bigotry they might have). It reads: Stephen...
France niqaab ban “not meant to help women”
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...
Faith schools are no menace
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...
Replicating spinal cord injuries in Saudi Arabia
Last week there was a news story about a man who faced the prospect of having a spinal cord injury inflicted on him surgically in Saudi Arabia as an Islamically-prescribed retaliatory penalty. The usual...
Web stats spam
It’s been a long time since anyone I know posted a list of the phrases people put into search engines to get to their site. In my case, the most common phrase is simply...
Daily Mail doctor notices sky is blue
This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d comment on it now since it appeared again in Invest in ME’s August newsletter (top article): a doctor named Martin Scurr who...
Let in immigrants, get extremists
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)...
Android upgrade drama at Vodafone and T-Mobile
BBC News – Vodafone backs down in Android row Vodafone (a major UK mobile phone network) have backed down after pushing what looked like an Android operating system upgrade for the HTC Desire phone,...
No moon in Iquique, Chile
Just going through the moon sighting reports on this page (it may still be giving virus warnings when you try to load it; it doesn't affect me as I use Linux) and one negative...
M.E. and the ethics of testing on sick kids
This past week, two major British M.E. organisations, the Young ME Sufferers Trust and the ME Association, issued a joint statement ([1], [2]) condemning as "unethical" a study, scheduled to start in September, of...
Let them eat halaal meat
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...
Christina Patterson again: London’s human zoo
Since my last entry on the bigoted ravings of Christina Patterson in last week’s Independent, Patterson herself has written a follow-up piece on all the demented people who have written to her and blogged...
The Court of Little Protection
Yesterday, the BBC station Radio 4 ran a feature on the so-called Court of Protection, the body set up to manage the financial affairs of those who are incapable of doing it themselves, such...
Haredis and FGM: like a newly caught fish
I was alerted to an article by one Christina Patterson (former director of the Poetry Society and literary programmer at the South Bank Centre in London) setting out what she considers the “limits of...
Crime victims’ groups round on crime victim
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...
Tabloid feeding frenzy over Venables
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...
Rape by deceit is rape, but …
BBC News – Israeli Arab who 'raped' a woman says verdict 'racist' How did this man manage to deceive an Israeli Jewish woman that he was Jewish? Surely, as a native Arabic speaker, he...
Doctors scare chronically sick patients too
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...