Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Recently I've seen some quite preposterous commentary on the Scottish independence referendum, which is taking place as I type this. I have heard that the turnout for this has been higher than at any...
In under a week as of this writing, the Scottish independence referendum will have been held and the votes will either have been counted, or will be in the process. Last Sunday in the...
Recently, two people I know (or knew) on Twitter posted threats to kill themselves. One of them is a woman who has bipolar disorder and has been in hospital on several occasions recently; the...
The last couple of weeks a few things have made me seriously consider the state of free speech in the UK. One was that a man (Michael Abberton, right) who had posted some innocuous...
Newspapers are reporting that a woman from Liverpool, Kim Walmsley (right), has had her marriage annulled, and been refused a passport, because the official copy of her birth certificate wrongly records her gender as...
I regularly read a blog, Blogging Astrid, by an autistic woman in the Netherlands who has been blogging about her life since her teens, but since 2007 it has been about her life in...
This past week, a man from Surrey was given a non-custodial sentence for a series of serious sexual assaults against a 12-year-old girl in December 2012. Adam Hulin plied the young girl, whose age...
Last night three children were found dead at their home in New Malden, at an address half a mile from where I live. Olivia Clarence, aged four, and twins Max and Ben Clarence, aged...
Yesterday I decided to have a walk through the Olympic Park, which opened a couple of weeks ago after having been closed since the end of the Olympics in 2012. I was excited that...
“Want the Tories out next year? Only one way to do it” from Ron’s Rants Ron Graves explains in the post above that if you want to get rid of the Tories in 2015,...
It's been reported recently that a man who killed a man with one punch on a street in Bournemouth has been sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison (see also today's Daily Mirror), which means...
The Queen and Prince Charles cash in on tens of thousands of pounds' worth of benefits every year – Mirror Online The Daily Mirror yesterday ran with a story about how the royal estates,...
Today the report into the death (PDF) of Connor Sparrowhawk, an 18-year-old who drowned in an NHS learning disability unit in Oxford last July (see earlier entry), was published. That it was published was...
Update 5:43pm: The report is out. My response is scheduled for publication at 6:30pm GMT. Southern Health: report publication update Southern Health, the NHS trust responsible for the death of Connor Sparrowhawk in one...
It was reported today that there has been a rise in the number of teenagers under 18 admitted to adult psychiatric wards, and that these were sometimes hundreds of miles from home and often...
This morning I went for my latest blood test, which I have to have roughly every six months or a year — I can't even remember as I have so many of them —...
Last Thursday, the two men who murdered the soldier Lee Rigby in the street outside an army barracks in Woolwich and then paraded on camera with bloodied hands and a meat cleaver, were found...
A couple of weeks ago, a Care Quality Commission report was published that revealed that two NHS units for people with learning disabilities on the same site in Oxford were dreadful — they failed...
Why I, as a Muslim, believe the veil must be barred in our schools: A provocative view from Islamic thinker fighting for Glenda Jackson's seat Maajid Nawaz, the former member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir who was...
Labour will be tougher than Tories on benefits, promises new welfare chief (from the Guardian) Rachel Reeves, “Labour” MP for Leeds West, former economist at the Bank of England and now Shadow Secretary for...