Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
Guardian Unlimited: Something remarkable Robina Qureshi on what you might not hear about the situation in Glasgow vis-a-vis the resettled asylum seekers: the fact that the community has rallied around them, to the extent...
Guardian Unlimited: Our press, the worst in the west, demoralises us all Polly Toynbee (someone with whom I agree vary rarely) on the hypocritical media condemnations of the sailors who were captured by Iran....
O'Reilly Radar: Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct I'm really quite surprised that it's taken the recent "Kathy Sierra affair" ([1], [2]) for the blogging community to get around to drawing up a "code of...
I'm just typing my first ever blog entry on a computer running Windows Vista, on my uncle's new Dell. And really, it's the most appallingly slow piece of software I've ever used. (I'm using...
Last week, as I said in my last-but-one post, I went with my family to Wales, specifically Tywyn (pronounced Towin'), the same small town I went to with them for a few days last...
BBC NEWS – From Our Own Correspondent: Yemen’s khat habit soaks up water This is a BBC report about the qat (or khat) habit, which uses 40% of Yemen’s scarce water supply and is...
BBC NEWS | Politics | Marriage visa age to rise to 21 The Government have announced that they are raising the minimum age for acquiring a marriage visa to the UK from 18 to...
BBC NEWS | Health | WHO agrees HIV circumcision plan The World Health Organisation today recommended that the circumcision of boys be used as a means of preventing AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, although obviously...
The other day I started getting eBay messages in reply to messages I had supposedly sent out. The messages sent under my name claimed to be from a company exporting electronic equipment from China, complete with email address (not mine) and a phone number. I sent a couple of messages to those who’d contacted me telling them that the messages were a scam and weren’t from me. (Interestingly, none of them were abusive at all; one of them told me the prices were too steep, but there were no F words or insults.)
Minette Marrin: Sentenced to rot in their failed schools (Sunday TImes) A case against another of this government’s stupid recent ideas: keeping kids in school until they’re 18. Theoretically, this is supposed to include...
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...
For the wrongly jailed, there is no Shawshank Redemption ending (Guardian Unlimited) John McManus of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO, set up by Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six) on the grotesque spectacle...
Anglo-neocons are slaves to America and not serving us (Guardian Unlimited) Geoffrey Wheatcroft (The Strange Death of Tory England, Yo! Blair) on the clique of “Anglo-neocons” surrounding David Cameron whose position on the Iraq...
The Guardian have been serialising extracts from the last book written by the assassinated Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya ([1], [2]). In today's G2 supplement, there is an account of her meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov,...
George Monbiot, in today's Guardian, on the fake consultations which accompany the Olympic developments in east London: chiefly, the difficulties one had to go to in order to get copies of the plans, which...
Last Friday night I went to a City Circle event in London entitled Independent Voices: Challenging the Myth of Monolithic Communities, addressed by two founders of dissenting ethnic organisations, namely Brian Klug of Independent Jewish Voices and Sunny Hundal of the New Generation Network (and Pickled Politics) as well as Ehsan Masood, who writes for Prospect magazine.
Earlier this week, Leeds University cancelled a talk and a two-day workshop which was due to be delivered by the German academic and former adviser to his country's Green Party, Matthias Küntzel, on what...
Last Thursday, Patrick Mercer, the Conservative party’s spokesman for “homeland security”, was sacked from David Cameron’s shadow cabinet for giving an interview to the Times. He was reacting to the establishment of a “new...
Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The emperor’s green new clothes Melanie Phillips lapped up the recent documentary entitled “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, a polemic produced by Martin Durkin, a veteran of the old Revolutionary...
New Statesman – Apocalypse now? Johann Hari reviews America Alone, the quasi-novel by Mark Steyn recently published by Regnery (the same publishing house behind a lot of Robert Spencer’s dross) which gives a warning...