The Mosquito: why it really sucks
Yesterday a campaign was launched to ban a device called the Mosquito, which emits a high-pitched sound audible only to young people, intended to disperse groups of them who loiter in public places and...
Category: Politics
Review of London lecture on French hijab politics
This evening the American feminist academic Joan Wallach Scott, a professor of social science at Princeton, NJ, gave a lecture to promote her book, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007) (reviewed in the...
Mrs Brown’s Indian dress
Sarah Brown, the wife of the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has been attacked in certain sections of the media for wearing Indian dress on a visit to Delhi as part of a visit...
Recruiting Muslim spies
BBC – Radio 4 – News and Current Affairs – Recruiting Muslim Spies This is a BBC Radio 4 programme about attempts by the British security services to recruit Muslims as informants, supposedly to...
A case for agency workers’ rights
BBC NEWS: EU stalemate on workers’ rights I heard this being discussed on the radio this morning, with a discussion on the Today programme between representatives of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and...
Online terrorism and stupidity
This morning they were talking on Today about the woman who called herself the “Lyrical Terrorist”, who wrote ghoulish poems about slicing people’s heads off and was convicted of possessing material “likely to be...
Panic stations at St Pancras
Comment is free: Panic stations Christian Wolmar (British railways commentator) on the ridiculous security arrangements at the new St Pancras railway station in London, the terminal for trains to Paris: St Pancras, which reopened...
NeO to Guiliani
muslimmatters.org » “NeO” to Giuliani — United Against a Presidential Nightmare At the request of Amad, and at the risk of getting a flood of “how dare this Limey stick his nose into American...
CCTV, civil liberties and safety
CCTV is no silver bullet – it risks making life less safe – Guardian Unlimited A timely article by Libby Brooks about the proliferation of CCTV cameras in the UK. We have 20% of...
“Anti-Islamofascist” group to host … British fascist
I've just got a message from CAIR that "Young Americans for Freedom", one of the groups who have sponsored one of the so-called Islamofascist Awareness events in the USA, at which Rick Santorum spoke...
Response to Sayeeda Warsi on the BNP
Pickled Politics: Sayeeda Warsi and the BNP I thought someone would write a cogent reply to Sayeeda Warsi's interview in yesterday's Independent on Sunday, in which she claimed that the BNP have some legitimate...
Libel law censorship
Yesterday, several British political blogs were pulled down, including Bloggerheads, that of the former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, Bob Piper and Boris Johnson, when their web host gave in to threatening letters from lawyers acting for the Uzbek/Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who is trying to buy Arsenal football club. The threats were in response to allegations posted on Murray’s blog, which were reproduced here among other places. I can’t testify that what Murray says is true, of course, but Murray himself says has not received any correspondence from Usmanov’s lawyers. They have gone for the easy option of simply censoring his claims by leaning on his web hosts. (The whole article is still available at Indymedia.)
Amnesty mission creep and Catholic schools
Guardian Unlimited: Faith schools should not be tax-funded, and here’s why This is a reaction by a feminist to the decision by the Catholic church in Ireland to tell schools to shut down their...
Appeal regarding Bath mosque incident
Bath Chronicle: Yobs attack mosque in Bath Police have issued a CCTV image of two yobs who entered a mosque in Bath (England) on 11th July this year and urinated on worshippers’ belongings (strangely,...
Monbiot: the NHS and the Fat Cats Protection League
This great free-market experiment is more like a corporate welfare scheme (from today’s Guardian) This is a great article by George Monbiot about the tendency of the “free market” system to act as a...
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...
Life without hope
Life without hope: America's child prisoners – Weekend Guardian This story is a distressing read; it is about people locked up for life without parole as juveniles in the USA, in particular Michigan, although...
Doreen Lawrence condemns Johnson for mayor
Johnson 'would destroy London's unity' as mayor – Guardian Unlimited Politics Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, has told the Guardian that she thinks Boris Johnson, if elected mayor of...
Giving civil liberties a bad name
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,...
Pipes supports terrorists
Daniel Pipes: Unleash the Iranian Opposition This is an article by Daniel Pipes in the Jerusalem Post, plugging the so-called People's Mujahideen (or Mujahideen-e-Khalq), an organisation banned as a terrorist group in the US...