Next stop, Helsinki?
London buses headed in the same direction as Helsinki’s high-tech transport system – The Guardian The Guardian today had a feature, on the front of its technology supplement, on the recent introduction in London...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
The death penalty in light of the recent murder convictions
The last three working days in a row, there has been a man convicted for acts of violence against women. Last Thursday, it was Steve (or was his actual name Steven?) Wright, the man...
Times non-story about Muslim eating scruples
Last Friday the Times published a story claiming that "senior Muslim figures" had expressed shock that a number of Walkers crisp products had contained alcohol. The fact was "discovered" by one Besharat Rehman, the...
Put up or shut up, Nazir-Ali
Michael Nazir-Ali ([1], [2]) has been lent yet another adulatory interview by the Sunday Torygraph, with the same claims about death threats and one about his claim of no-go areas being “based on evidence”,...
A country for a plaything
Recently there has been a flurry of stories about foreigners being jailed in the United Arab Emirates for unbelievably petty drug “offences” which would not be detected, yet alone prosecuted, anywhere else. The story...
Brain dead technology
In today’s Guardian Media supplement, there was a familiar range of complaints about the new DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting, or something like that) radio system, among them the fact that the radio units are...
The fallacy of multiculturalism helping terrorism
Last week the Royal United Services Institute, "the leading forum in the UK for national and international Defence and Security" founded by the Duke of Wellington, published a report from a panel which included,...
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...
The presumption of Melanie Phillips
Today the storm over the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech last Thursday rumbles on, with the Scum newspaper having circulated a complaint form which it urged its readers to fill in and send to the...
Freely: lesser-known facts about the Turkish headscarf ban
Maureen Freely: Cover Stories from Comment is Free Maureen Freely (translator of Orhan Pamuk's books, who has spent a fair amount of time in Turkey) on the politics behind the recent move by the...
Ignorance and bigotry unleashed by Williams speech
Technorati Tags: shariah, rowan+williams Last Thursday the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, gave a lecture to an assembly of lawyers in London on the subject of Muslims in the UK whom, in his...
Showing their concern
I am sure anyone who reads the Independent will have heard of Parwiz Kambakhsh, the Afghan student jailed (and at one point threatened with the death penalty) for supposed blasphemy, which allegedly involved downloading...
Nazir-Ali complains of death threats
BBC NEWS: Threats to 'no-go areas' bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, Anglican bishop of Rochester, has complained of receiving death threats in response to his accusations about no-go areas defined by adherence to Islamic ideology in...
Photos from the South Downs
Birds in flocks, originally uploaded by Indigo Jo. The other day I had the use of the family car, so I decided to go down to the South Downs, a spectacular range of hills...
We can’t boycott everyone
Sister Kareema Hamdan, over at UmmahPulse.com, suggests a Muslim boycott of Dutch products in response to Geert Wilders’ planned film insulting the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) or Islam, claiming that a similar...
Muslims in London: Challenge Boris Johnson tonight!
Boris Johnson will be answering questions on the BBC London (94.9FM) drive-time show at 5pm this evening. If it follows the same pattern as Ken Livingstone’s last week, the interview will happen at 6pm....
The rebranding of Abdullah Quilliam
Abdullah Quilliam: Britain’s First Islamist? at Yahya Birt Yahya Birt demolishes the attempt to rebrand Abdullah Quilliam, the pioneer British Muslim of the Victorian era, as some sort of mascot for the pacified “British...
Martin Amis: he even had Muslim girlfriends, you know
The two faces of Amis – Features, Books – The Independent Johann Hari interviews Martin Amis ([1], [2]) for the first time since the controversy over his “adumbrations” to Ginny Dougary. He tells us...
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...