Guardian on ME and retroviruses, and other press coverage
First of all, this past week has been ME Awareness Week as I mentioned several times in my last article. This fact has got lost in all the election talk as might have been...
Category: Media
Jeremy Vine meets Kay Gilderdale again
This week is ME Awareness Week ([1], [2]), and a number of media appearances and articles have been scheduled, including two appearances from Kay Gilderdale (on Radio 2 today and, allegedly, on GMTV tomorrow...
JPost editorial tells Europe how to deal with Muslim women
Jerusalem Post: Rejecting the burka As Muslims it's been our recent experience that many of the voices raised loudest against Muslims in the west have connections to Israel, particularly in the United States but...
Me on the Late Show: transcript
Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I got to speak on the Late Show with Joanne Good on BBC London (94.9FM). She was doing a feature on bad comedy, specifically an incident in which Frankie Boyle, a...
The old white lady and the goldfish
Some of today’s papers carried a “the world’s gone mad” kind of story about how a pet shop owner, a great-grandmother no less, was given a £1,000 fine and will be made to wear...
IJB fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog, says government report
Last night I got word that my blog had been named in a British government report as the fourth most influential “pro-Islamic” blog. The report, published by the Home Office as a PDF file,...
Bombs in breast implants?!
The Sun today put out a story alleging that female suicide bombers were being fitted with bombs disguised within breast implants so that they couldn’t be detected by airport screening devices, according to “terrorist...
Why I still blog
Last week, Umar Lee posted his parting message to the Muslim blogging community, after his blog had been offline for some weeks. His reasoning was twofold: one is that all the best blogs (Sunni...
The real value of online friendships (Hadley Freeman revisited)
At the end of December there was an article by Hadley Freeman in the Guardian, characterising the past decade as a decade of fakery: fake science, fake politics and fake friendships connected only by...
Panorama and other media coverage of the Gilderdale affair
I’ve been following the media coverage of the Lynn Gilderdale attempted murder trial with some interest as I found it quite emotionally affecting, and have found most of the coverage to be sympathetic to...
Muslim women driving, and contrasts on niqab
I didn’t watch the Muslim Driving School programme, which was on BBC2 last Tuesday (at the right time to clash with Defamation, which I reviewed in my last entry), but I finally got round...
Rod Liddle and the Independent
Recently some of my Facebook friends joined a group called something like “I won’t buy the Independent again if Rod Liddle becomes editor”, and I thought briefly of joining. But I haven’t. The simple...
Facebook ‘fakery’ and vaccine scares
The noughties are defined by fakery | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian Hadley Freeman, normally a fashion columnist for the Guardian and someone I normally agree with fairly readily, opines...
WordPress permalink tip
For anyone setting up a new self-hosted WordPress blog (not on wordpress.com or any similar hosting service), here’s a tip on getting your permalinks set up and getting rid of the queries in the...
Local papers letting the powerful off the hook
I, too, mourn good local newspapers. But this lot just aren’t worth saving | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian And he mentions the Cambrian News … this was the local...
Stephen Fry might quit Twitter
It’s been reported that, after a bit of a tiff with a couple of his online followers, the comedian Stephen Fry is thinking of giving up on Twitter (more here). This all makes me...
How the 2006 niqab affair popularised the BNP
Gary Younge in today's Guardian traces the upsurge in anti-Muslim bigotry to Jack Straw's attack on the niqab in 2006: Three years ago this month Jack Straw argued his case for urging Muslim women...
Celebrity journalism is rubbish
The Guardian revealed yesterday and the day before that several British tabloids accepted stories about various celebrities which were demonstrably false from an undercover documentary maker who was filming them. The stories included one...
BNP on the BBC: stupidity or deception?
The BBC is being called on to investigate how two senior members of the British National Party were allowed to appear semi-anonymously on the youth-targeted Radio 1 Newsbeat programme. Mark Collett, BNP publicity director,...
Hey Emel, what have you done to my avatar?
Back in late 2008, I got contacted by Emel magazine, a British Muslim lifestyle magazine, for a feature on Muslim bloggers. The process of getting the material over there took months, and I dealt...