Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective
The other day I had a brief tweet discussion with Liz Ball, campaigns involvement officer with Sense, the British deafblind charity, about whether Braille would have become established as the major means of written...
The niqab is not just a fashion statement | @guardianletters | World news | The Guardian These two letters appeared in today's Guardian in response to an article in yesterday's edition by Gaby Hinsliff,...
Last Thursday ITV broadcast a 24-minute programme titled Against the Odds, which supposedly revealed "the reality of life for people with learning disabilities in the UK, with many experiencing harassment and violence and just...
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...
I'm sure everyone has heard of the "ice-bucket challenge", in which someone is filmed having a bucket of freezing water poured over their head in response to donations to a charity, usually one dedicated...
On Friday 1st August, Claire Dyer's family lost their legal bid to stop her being transferred from an assessment and treatment unit in Swansea, where her family live, to a medium-secure unit near Brighton,...
Update 30th July, 14:13: See this BBC news report – this may be on TV later, especially in Wales. Update 14:55: There is to be a court hearing this Friday; Claire will not be...
Demos: build retirement properties to free up 3 million family homes I was going to be writing a piece this morning about how unworkable it would be to ‘encourage’ the over-55s to move out...
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...
Last January I wrote about Claire Dyer, a young autistic woman in Swansea who was at the time being threatened with transfer to a secure hospital in Northampton. Then as now, she was living...
The past month or so, I’ve been working full-time, and most of that has been in one job that requires quite long hours — it usually starts at 9am (which is late for a...
Mark and Kerry McDougall, the Scottish couple who fled to Ireland in 2009 to avoid the social services in Fife, Scotland, taking her then unborn son into care at birth (on the grounds that...
I’m a bit late in writing about this, as I’ve been working long hours the past two weeks during which the Ofsted report into a number of Birmingham schools supposedly targeted by a conspiracy...
There’s a letter in the current (July 2014) edition of Truck & Driver magazine from one D Pardner (address withheld) moaning about everything about foreign truck drivers, particularly eastern Europeans. He claims that they...
On Tuesday Amie van Dyk, mother of Ayn van Dyk who was seized from her home in Canada by social services after briefly wandering from her father’s home in June 2011 (see previous posts),...
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...
Last Thursday there was a BBC documentary about thalidomide, the drug used to suppress sickness in pregnant women which was responsible for serious birth defects in the children of the women who took it....
Last week a number of newspapers ran with prominent stories that supermarkets and restaurant chains were using halal meat, or had been doing so without their customers’ knowledge for some time. This is actually...
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...