Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
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...
This morning I heard a news item, marking a month since a ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces came into force, involving one Dave West, a club owner on Jermyn Street, London W1,...
This afternoon I had my third encounter with the police under the present anti-terrorism régime. However, it’s the first time that suspicion has been raised about me personally. Kingston has an Apple Store, which...
In the wake of the recent disappearance, as yet unresolved, of Madeleine McCann on the Algarve in Portugal, nobody who listens to the British media could have missed the flood of smug mums and...
Is the smoking ban a good idea? | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited In a few weeks' time, smoking in enclosed public spaces will become illegal in the UK; such places include pubs and...
Naomi Wolf has an article in today's Guardian entitled Fascist America, in 10 easy steps, which lists ten things governments generally do when turning a country from a democracy to a dictatorship. It's not...
Sunday Telegraph: A passport to misery, if you ask me… Jenny McCartney, in today's Sunday Telegraph, on the bureaucratic nightmare that the British government's demand that all new passport applicants attend a face-to-face interview...
George Monbiot: A glut of barristers at Westminster has led to a crackdown on dissent This was in today’s Guardian (also find it, with references, here at George Monbiot’s own archive). The context is...
Some people just don't get it about the "road charging" situation. I signed the petition, along with well over a million others. No doubt, the government will simply brush it off, as they brushed...
Telegraph Comment: Sinister security Surprisingly hostile response from the London Telegraph's "Digital Democrats" to the news of a deal between the US Homeland Security department and un-named Brussels Bureaucrats. Admittedly this comes from Europe,...
This week the old chestnut of “road pricing” – that is, charging motorists by the mile depending on where they drive and when – appeared again in a report comissioned by the Government and produced by the former British Airways chief Rod Eddington, which appeared on Friday. The report “concludes that the potential benefits of charging motorists for using roads will outweigh the costs of the scheme” and that charging “will put some people off driving entirely, cut congestion and carbon emissions and could raise up to £16bn a year in payments”.
Cracked it! Guardian Unlimited Steve Boggan explains how he and "a friendly computer expert" managed to crack the security codes on the new British biometric passport (the one which provided an excuse to hike...
That's Me on Screen! (free registration required) Craig Murray (former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who resigned after exposing the human rights abuses carried out by "Islam Karimov" and then stood against Jack Straw) on...
Iain Dale: Sir Ian Blair Says New Terror Attack Could Lead to Internment British blogger Iain Dale on a meeting at the Reform club in London, at which the Metropolitan Police commissioner Ian Blair...
New Statesman – Watching you watching me Brendan O'Neill (of Spiked fame) on the huge popularity of CCTV cameras in the UK, including a visit to a hidden "spy bunker" beneath London's Trocadero centre,...
Raed in the Middle: back from the mideast Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-American blogger, on his trip to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and what happened when he tried getting on a plane from New York...
Zia Sardar in the current edition of the New Statesman on the folly of “intelligence-led” police operations:
Don’t be fooled by the mantra that intelligence is an extremely difficult business, prone to absurdly wide margins of error. If that were so, Britain would have lost the Second World War. The remarkable success of British intelligence, including counter-intelligence, during that war proves that we can produce reasonable – say, 25 or even 50 per cent – rates of success.
The family of the two men arrested in the raid a week ago are urging Muslims not to take part in a march organised by "al-Ghurabaa", an off-shoot of al-Muhajiroun, according to this report...
Last week Umar Lee blogged a piece about “child terrorists” who rampage in the streets of New York every day of the school year. The young thugs get out of school and terrorise the...
In the Guardian today, Jenni Russell has a column describing the danger you are in when you argue with a petty "public service" jobsworth: One of them aggressively thrust a BAA [British Airports Authority]...