Category: News

Jury rejects conspiracy theories about Lady Diana

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...

Tobacco display ban: beyond the easy parodies

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....

Missing canoeist charged with deception

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 for rejecting proposal on chat show

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...

Shocking

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...

British tourists raped in Jordan

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...

Dentists as moral arbiters

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...

Internet temptation?

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...

Mother Teresa: the crisis and the scandal

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...

Mission creep: Amnesty and abortion

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...

Sexual harassment is no joke

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...

Round-up of the week

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...

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV

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!...

More on Misbah Rana

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,...

“The point” about gays and discrimination

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...

Unhappy Christmas

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...