{"id":370,"date":"2007-07-14T18:25:18","date_gmt":"2007-07-14T17:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2007\/07\/14\/round-up_of_the_week"},"modified":"2025-10-10T10:52:39","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T09:52:39","slug":"round-up_of_the_week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2007\/07\/14\/round-up_of_the_week","title":{"rendered":"Round-up of the week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the absence of an entry since Wednesday on the grounds of too much work and too little energy for composing one, here&#39;s a round-up of this week&#39;s news, <em>insha Allah<\/em>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The <em>Guardian<\/em> printed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/Iraq\/Story\/0,,2125142,00.html\">this piece<\/a>, originally from <em>The Nation<\/em>, compiled from interviews with US Iraq war vets.  Really, what can I say?  When they wreck people&#39;s houses on a whim and spray bullets at a car for driving a bit too fast near a checkpoint, can we really believe the story that the &quot;insurgency&quot; is actually a Saudi Wahhabi-dominated plot to re-establish a global caliphate?\n<\/li>\n<li>Still on the subject of the alleged &quot;war on terror&quot;, Clive Stafford Smith <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/200707120031\">in the current <em>New Statesman<\/em><\/a> explains how one of his clients, abducted in Pakistan and sold to the Americans, was repatriated to Tunisia, a notoriously repressive country with a long record of unjust imprisonment and torture, to face a 23-year jail term (we&#39;re not told what for, but it was held while he was unable to defend himself) before his lawyers could see him in Guant&aacute;namo.  It&#39;s these sorts of countries our government want to send alleged terrorists back to.  Sickening.\n<\/li>\n<li>On a quite different subject, the &quot;super casino&quot; plan for Manchester <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/6291764.stm\">has been put on ice<\/a>.  This is really good news <em>ma sha Allah<\/em>.  I don&#39;t know why anyone thinks casinos equal regeneration when they are dumped in a deprived area; if anything, recent evidence shows that gambling shops are a sign that an area is going down-hill, simply because they fill up with people desperate for money.  The only way to regenerate any area is to invest in it with real industry.\n<\/li>\n<li>Don&#39;t know how much news this was in America, but <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/business\/6897991.stm\">the conviction of Conrad Black<\/a> for fraud was big news in the UK.  Obviously I don&#39;t object if he has stolen shareholders&#39; money and used it for his own ends and gets locked up, but I don&#39;t believe that a jail sentence in double figures is justified for a non-violent property crime.  In this country, he would get five years or so &#8211; and, no doubt, be barred from company directorships and face other public disgraces, as Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken did.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the absence of an entry since Wednesday on the grounds of too much work and too little energy for composing one, here&#39;s a round-up of this week&#39;s news, insha Allah: The Guardian printed&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-5Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42020,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/42020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}