Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Over the past summer, a number of newspapers and broadcast outlets claimed that some so-called ME researchers had been receiving death threats from so-called militant ME sufferers, such that some had abandoned the field,...
I recently received my copy of the conference DVDs from Invest in ME, which had its annual conference in London in May, but held up distribution of the DVDs because one of the presentations...
While I’ve been following the case of Ayn Van Dyk, the autistic girl seized from her father for ridiculous reasons in British Columbia in June and still in care (see earlier post), there has...
OK, so after posting that long article criticising disabled and/or autistic self-advocates for forgetting how hard it was to raise a profoundly disabled or severely autistic child, I had this tweet today: Yesterday,a daycare...
Many years ago, there lived a scholar who asked an old rabbi what could be learned from the Talmud. The rabbi told him of two men who fell down a chimney. One arrived at...
Last week, the University of Bristol published a study partly funded by Action for ME which highlighted the economic cost of ME and "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" (more accurately, the cost of illness to service...
BBC News – Reading man jailed for dead girl 'trolling' insults A man has been jailed for 18 weeks for posting insulting messages on Facebook pages dedicated to young people who had died, in...
On Thursday it was announced that the rules governing who can give blood in the UK was changed; previously, any man who had ever had sex with a man was permanently excluded; the new...
BC Local News: Abbotsford dad still fighting to have daughter returned home Over the past few months I’ve been following the case of Ayn Van Dyk, a 9-year-old autistic girl from British Columbia (Canada)...
Yesterday it was announced that the Whittemore-Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada had won a long-running campaign for a $100,000 grant from the Vivint home security company (formerly APX Alarm) called the Vivint Gives Back...
Atos moves to shut down criticism | Tentacles of doom (also see Carer Watch) The above article is about how ATOS, the French company hired by the British government to conduct disability assessments, has...
A little over a week ago I responded to accusations that people in the ME community were threatening scientists who were involved in "valuable" research into the cause and treatment of ME, because their...
On Friday morning, the BBC’s Radio 4 ran a feature on the supposed intimidation of scientists working on “chronic fatigue syndrome, also called ME” which is claimed to be driving people away from researching...
Acting up: is hysteria all in the mind? | Life and style | The Guardian Asti Hustvedt has written a large book on the “celebrity” hysterics of 19th-century Paris, whose doctor, Jean-Martin Charcot, paraded...
Michael McIntyre endures jealousy of rival comics | Mail Online I'm not all that familiar with the comedy of Michael Macintyre, who has a reputation for being the "nice guy" of British comedy at...
Note: if you can see Lynn Gilderdale below (that’s the lady with the feeding tube), reload or click the title to read the entry. You should see a still of a footpath through grass....
The Sun today was very proud to declare that Gordon Brown was wrong to accuse them of hacking his phone, or illegally accessing his voicemail, to make their "scoop" in November 2006, and that...
This post is also available at Where's the Benefit, and you can comment there or here. Ex-ballerina Elaine McDonald care ruling 'shameful' (with video) I wasn't aware of this case until I read earlier...
I recently got hold of two books by Simon Baron-Cohen which focus on the subject of empathy. The earlier, The Essential Difference, focusses on the difference in empathy and systemising between men and women;...
This past week it was reported in the news that Ryan Cleary, who had been arrested and charged over an alleged role in cracking the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which...