Bush, Google and censorship
BBC NEWS: White House plans open government An interesting report on how the Obama government intends to open up the White House website to search engines. Under Bush, they "blocked" search engines from indexing...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Response to Umar Lee on Shaikh Hamza Yusuf
Umar Lee has posted an exposé of what he calls "Rand Institute Muslims" or RIMs as they supposedly exist in 21st-century America. Their characteristics, according to him, are "detachment from the Islamic Revival", supporting...
Heathrow: the sweetener which isn’t
Gordon Brown today gave the go-ahead for the third runway at Heathrow airport, the international airport in the western suburbs of London. I posted what Simon Jenkins wrote about this disaster yesterday, and here...
My letter’s in the Technology Guardian
The technology supplement to the Guardian published a letter from me today, concerning the "no clue" nature of Apple's attitude to low-cost computer kit. You can read what they published here, but here's what...
The fashion police blitz on “rural Surrey”
Trinny and Susannah are something of a national institution here; they are best known as the faces of What Not to Wear and a series of less well-known programmes since they left BBC and...
Nothing overwhelming except the damage
Simon Jenkins: A runway for jobs? It's time aviation's bluff was called (The Guardian) An excellent opinion piece on the stream of lies and broken promises which have led to the proposal for the...
If only … I weren’t such a vicious thug
Last night and the night before, there were discussions about knife crime on the BBC London station, based around a BBC Panorama programme in which Raphael Rowe, a BBC reporter who had been in...
Prince Harry and his little friend
On Sunday, the News of the World (also known as the News of the Screws, a tabloid “scandal sheet” owned by Rupert Murdoch known for printing kiss-and-tell stories) put on its front page a...
Videos from the Palestine rally
I shot a few videos with my new camcorder at the rally for Palestine yesterday. Besides wanting to do this for its own sake as the first serious usage of my new toy, I...
Exciting times to be out of a job
Train company is to cut 300 jobs Southeastern trains [which operates trains in south-east London and Kent] is to make 300 people redundant over the coming year. The company blamed "reduced passenger journey growth"...
British welfare laws and foreign competitors
On Tuesday, the Guardian printed a lengthy article about welfare standards – or lack of them – on pig farms on the Continent (Europe). Now, as Muslims we may not be too fond of...
Study Islam, become an atheist?
Douglas Murray has an article in the latest edition of the Spectator (which at least had an edition last week, unlike the New Statesman which insisted that we make do with one edition for...
Muslims and Neturei Karta
Reading Mas’ud Khan’s account of his recent exchange with Melanie Phillips ([1], [2], [3]), I noticed that he had mentioned Neturei Karta to her, asking her whether she regarded them as “self-hating Jews”. NK,...
Motorbikes in bus lanes: where’s the beef?
Today an experimental scheme comes into operation in London, allowing motorcyclists to use bus lanes on “red routes” (main roads with stopping restrictions for all or part of the day). They have been allowed...
End of the long party
Now that it’s the evening of New Year’s Day, and the holiday season will be over in a few hours (even if it’s still the school holidays and a few people will be taking...
Let US clear up Guantanamo mess
Some sense from a columnist at the Times, no less: it was the USA who rounded up men too casually in their "war on terror", and it is they who should take in the...
Where I’ve been
I’ve been either ill or busy the past week. Before and after last week I had a job which required 12 and a half hour average days, then I went down with flu and...
Brass Crescent appreciation
I'd just like to say a huge thank you and jazakum Allah khair to all those who voted for me in the recent Brass Crescent awards. This blog won in the Best European blog...
A matter of dignity
On Thursday, there were reports about a woman who had taken her former employer, a bar in Mayfair, London, to court for supposedly sacking her for refusing to wear their staff uniform, a short...
Turning back the clock on Muslim history
Criticism of the Ottoman Sultans | Global Intifada Jinnzaman has an interesting feature on scholarly criticism of the Ottoman empire, which was not as simplistic as some Muslims portray it, by calling all of...