Review: Lost Voices
Lost Voices is published by Invest in ME, a British charity which concentrates on promoting research into the causes of, and a possible cure for, the debilitating neurological disease, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME); they have...
Category: Politics
Suburban Barclays bank robbed
Yesterday a branch of Barclays bank was robbed near London. It happened in Ashford — not the one in Kent where the Eurostar trains stop, but the quiet suburban sprawl north of Staines which...
Aung San Suu Kyi and futility
Yesterday, the Guardian printed previously unseen pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi, the one-time Burmese democracy leader, at various points both in Asia in her youth and in the UK as a married woman,...
Uniforms more important than school meals?
This morning, I heard an interview with the woman who had stood to be mayor of Newham, the east London borough, in the most recent local elections (the same day as the general election)....
When your cosmetics make others ill
Student kicked out of class because of her hair product? This article got flagged up on Facebook: an African-American schoolgirl was kicked out of class by a white teacher in Seattle because her hair...
Wakefield, vaccines and ME
Earlier today, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in the Lancet, a major British medical journal suggesting that the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) might be a cause of autism,...
Norman Geras demolishes Hitchens on niqab ban (partly)
I was directed by Islamophobia Watch to an article on Normblog taking apart Christopher Hitchen's arguments on the Slate website in favour of banning the niqaab in France and elsewhere. The Belgian parliament has...
White guy threatens to bomb airport, gets slap on wrist, much whingeing ensues
Last week a guy called Paul Chambers was fined a total of £1,000 (all but £385 of which was either costs or a "victim surcharge") for posting a tweet threatening to blow up an...
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...
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...
Why Muslims shouldn’t fear proportional representation
Recently I’ve seen a discussion on Facebook in which one Muslim brother said we should not be so keen on proportional representation because it’s likely to lead to the BNP getting seats, which they...
Obligatory post-election post
So, the votes have been cast and most of them have been counted, and we definitely have a hung Parliament, although disappointingly the Tories are the biggest single party and the Lib Dems have...
Obligatory election post
I haven't written anything about this coming election so far. There are a variety of reasons for this: for one thing, I haven't had the inclination, despite having plenty of time on my hands,...
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...
To extradite a bed-ridden woman
Earlier today I read that a woman from mid-Wales who is bed-ridden with fibromyalgia and also suffers from Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and depression has been refused an appeal in the High Court against extradition...
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...
Why don’t people abandon support groups with bad policies?
Recently I read an article by Jodi Bassett, a campaigner on ME issues who suffers from the severe form of that illness, on the Planet Thrive website (it’s also posted on her own site)...
Harassment “commonplace” for those with learning disabilities
Last Wednesday in Manchester, a 64-year-old man with learning disabilities, David Askew, collapsed and died after two youths broke down his garden gate and tampered with his mother’s scooter. He had not been physically...
Niqaab and rickets in the UK
Today I found a post at the blog The Answer’s 42 alleging that the so-called burqa was to blame for the increased incidence of vitamin D deficiency in Asian women in the UK and...
Erwin James on the Angola Three
37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three | Society | The Guardian I had heard of the Angola Three before today, but this article puts the whole case into very clear detail for...