British footballers, privacy and gender
Wayne Rooney’s infidelity exposes law’s misogyny | Media | The Guardian This week it was announced that Mr Justice (David) Eady, is being replaced as head of the Queen’s bench jury and non-jury lists,...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Is the iPhone really a design classic?
London Design festival: Has British design lost its way? | Art and design | The Guardian There’s a feature in today’s Guardian about the Anti Design Festival, which starts this coming Saturday in London...
Retaliation and the story of Khidr
I saw an article today posted at Harry’s Place and also at Foreign Policy Journal, entitled “The Problem of Honor Killings” by one Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, described in his biography as “a student at...
The Humanist dream school
Welcome to my dream school | Education | The Guardian This article appeared in the Guardian last Friday, but only now I've got round to commenting on it. I read it eagerly and think...
How to get women into tech
Why We Don’t Need More Women In Tech… Yet « I just saw an article on why calling for "getting more women into technology" is useless, namely that there just aren't enough female computer...
Bidisha and feminist language policing
Sluts and sweethearts | Life and style | The Guardian Yesterday I saw an article by feminist novelist and arts commentator Bidisha promoting a feminist language-policing site called Name It, Change It which presents...
How to upgrade your T-Mobile G2
For months I’ve been hearing that T-Mobile were going to be posting an upgrade to their Android-based G2 Touch phone, which is their branded version of the HTC Hero which was available on every...
SF Chronicle cluelessness about Afghan paedophilia
Fareena Alam flagged up this article — Afghanistan’s dirty little secret — which is about the Pashtun custom known as bacha bazi, in which boys dress as girls and dance for grown men who...
Seize their buildings
Earlier today I watched the Dispatches programme, Britain’s Secret Slaves (in the UK, you can watch it on their 4oD service), about the mistreatment of domestic workers in the UK. The first half, roughly,...
Afghan gas attacks weren’t hysteria after all
From the New York Times: Blood tests have confirmed that a mysterious series of cases of mass sickness at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful...
Getting drawn back into Eastenders
Last week I stopped watching EastEnders (this is a BBC soap opera set in a fictional mostly white east end of London, without any Bengalis or Somalis) because I finally became exasperated with how...
Spectator forced to apologise to Islam Expo
Inayat Bunglawala drew our attention yesterday to an apology published in the Spectator, a British right-wing political magazine (a tedious rag where people flaunt whatever privilege and bigotry they might have). It reads: Stephen...
France niqaab ban “not meant to help women”
France’s ban on the Islamic veil has little to do with female emancipation | Law | guardian.co.uk Joan Wallach Scott, the author of The Politics of the Veil, on the real motivation behind the...
Faith schools are no menace
Last week, Richard Dawkins delivered a polemic on the British digital TV channel, More 4, against the principle of government support for faith schools. (It is available for viewing at 4 On Demand, although...
Replicating spinal cord injuries in Saudi Arabia
Last week there was a news story about a man who faced the prospect of having a spinal cord injury inflicted on him surgically in Saudi Arabia as an Islamically-prescribed retaliatory penalty. The usual...
Web stats spam
It’s been a long time since anyone I know posted a list of the phrases people put into search engines to get to their site. In my case, the most common phrase is simply...
Daily Mail doctor notices sky is blue
This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d comment on it now since it appeared again in Invest in ME’s August newsletter (top article): a doctor named Martin Scurr who...
Let in immigrants, get extremists
This is something I got through a tweet from 5CC or Tabloid Watch, but Osama Saeed jogged my memory about it. An election campaign card which was used by Phil Woolas during his (successful)...
Android upgrade drama at Vodafone and T-Mobile
BBC News – Vodafone backs down in Android row Vodafone (a major UK mobile phone network) have backed down after pushing what looked like an Android operating system upgrade for the HTC Desire phone,...
No moon in Iquique, Chile
Just going through the moon sighting reports on this page (it may still be giving virus warnings when you try to load it; it doesn't affect me as I use Linux) and one negative...