Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Before the week begins in earnest, I thought I might offer a round-up of stories which caught my eye the past week: Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian on the stupid, racist gibberish which has...
BBC NEWS: Princess Diana unlawfully killed An inquest jury in London has found that the late Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, and her lover Emad “Dodi” Fayed, son of Mohamed al-Fayed, was unlawfully killed...
Over the weekend the government announced that it was considering banning the open display of cigarettes for sale, as is commonly found in any tobacco shop, whether a local corner shop or a supermarket....
Canoeist charged with fraud and deception (The Observer) I kind of got the impression that this disappearing act was a scam, if not from the moment he turned up, then not long after. The...
Woman killed after rejecting TV marriage proposal – Guardian Unlimited This is a story about a woman who was murdered in Spain after rejecting a marriage proposal from her violent partner, delivered on a...
BBC NEWS: Former head sentenced for cruelty This loathsome creature, who ran a dumping ground, I mean special school, for children with special needs in Norfolk – not a million miles from the place...
The news agencies are reporting that two British women were raped last Saturday in fields near to the Jordan-Israel border. The women, who had been studying Arabic in Damascus, were on a short visit...
The other, invisible suffering of Burma « Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist In the recent rush to support the monk-led uprising against the military junta in Burma, the situation of the long-suffering Muslim minority,...
The BBC yesterday reported that a Muslim dentist in Bury, near Manchester, has been brought before a disciplinary tribunal accused of demanding that a Muslim woman wear a hijab to his practice if she...
BBC NEWS: Job losses over eBay ‘addiction’ A council in south Wales has fired nine of its staff for spending “up to two hours per day” on eBay. The council has a policy of...
It was the 10th anniversary of Mother Teresa's death yesterday, as shown on this BBC News article, but it's noticeable that everybody is concentrating on her supposed "crisis of faith", the spiritual emptiness she...
Amnesty International last week announced that it had abandoned its policy of neutrality on the issue of abortion in favour of supporting it “in some circumstances”, including pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or...
Yesterday, for the second time in the space of a week, they were discussing sexual harassment on Vanessa Feltz's morning phone-in show. The occasion yesterday was the report that a driving instructor had been...
In the absence of an entry since Wednesday on the grounds of too much work and too little energy for composing one, here's a round-up of this week's news, insha Allah: The Guardian printed...
BBC NEWS: Red-haired family forced to move This report is about a family which has had to move house twice because of harrassment by moronic neighbours who took objection to … their red hair!...
Further to Wednesday's post on Misbah Rana, there is a well-balanced article on the Guardian comment site today, acknowledging that the recent custody decision on Misbah Rana is "the best, or the least bad,...
Right now, as I write this, the British House of Lords (for non-Brits, that’s an unelected upper house which can only suggest amendments and delay laws, not actually block them, although it could in...
I'm sure none of us has missed the story of "Ashley", the nine-year-old from Washington state whose parents subjected her to major surgery, removing her reproductive system and breast buds and giving her hormone...
BBC NEWS: "I'm a risk to myself at Christmas" This article addresses the thing I hate most about Christmas – the fact that the whole country goes into shutdown mode, with no public transport...
I'm sure that by now the Ipswich murders are known far beyond the UK – for those who have not heard, five young prostitutes have gone missing from the red light district of Ipswich...