BleedingHeartShow

Depending on your point of view, it’s either an innovative approach to building community relations or proof of the Islamisation of our police force. You might’ve heard about the revelation that two sergeants and a community support officer spent a day accompanying a group of Muslim women around Sheffield city centre. All the women, including the white police officers, were dressed in Islamic costumes, including the burkha, jilbab, hijab and niqab.

Naturally, a lot of folks have flapped…

Not sure whether I’ll find the time to write anything this week or will just subject you all to link dumps. Watch this space, I guess.

• Caroline Bennett has words & pictures on the Mexico prison where children live with their incarcerated mothers.
• In the BMJ, Richard Smith thinks about ‘living funerals’.
• Andrew Dismore adds to the call for an inquiry into allegations of UK complicity in torture.
• David Aaranovitch takes on the ‘Facebook kills children’ meme.
• Yoel Marcus sees…

Been a while since I did one of these…

Matthew Engel calls for an end to the war on drugs.

• Albor Ruiz on the constitution-trampling excesses of the Honduran military.
• In Afghanistan, human rights workers call for more aid, not more troops.
• Jess McCabe finds an interesting study into the differences between feminist & non-feminist women’s views of men; discovers proof that feminists don’t actually hate men.
• Are we starting to see some sanity from this government over the…

The other day, a friend asked me to tap a few words in support of the protests by workers at the Vestas wind turbine factory who’re trying to stop the loss of over 600 jobs and a potentially important resource for expanding renewable energy. Whilst that support is freely given and sincerely felt, the circumstances of the case have been so widely-stated and well-documented elsewhere that I don’t want to spend too long restating the obvious.

It’s clear that Vestas…

In my school sociology class, we used to hear a lot about the ‘Golden Age ‘. We used to learn that for every age of innocence evoked by the media or our older relatives, there were still plenty of dangers, tragedies & traumas, and that we should treat with scepticism those claims that life was much safer, healthier & more civil than the times in which we live.

The ultimate lesson from all this – that our best days are not, in fact, behind us – was a formative influence on my…

Because the woman behind this…

Is obviously far more principled than Margaret Moran.

On paper at least, William Hague seems like he could be a qualified & competent Foreign Secretary. Ideological differences aside, the former Tory leader is regarded as one of the smartest men in his party, is a keen debater and someone who apparently possesses a strong interest in, and grasp of, British history. These qualities (particularly the last) are all important in a top diplomat, and I think it’s safe to say they have not been present in every one of Labour’s foreign ministers.

…

Meet Jim DeMint. Jim is a United States Senator from South Carolina, one of the most conservative members of Congress and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Silly Analogies.

Worried that Barack Obama might merrily lead his country to dictatorship, DeMint has claimed the administration is eerily redolent of Orwell’s 1984; has suggested that America now resembles Germany just before WWII; and has speculated that the Hopey One may – in the words of ABBA – finally be facing…

There’s a special time, which only comes once a year, where music fans, bloggers & journalists all get to gather in their pubs, clubs or online communities and stage their own re-enactment of this toe-curlingly true scene from High Fidelity:

I am, of course, talking about the announcement of the nominees for this year’s Mercury Music Prize, an award which is as important to the British music scene as it is maligned by a large number of the folks who follows it. Every…

• In Nigeria, Eamon Kircher Allen finds some of the folks behind those internet email scams.
• Simon Jenkins objects to the panic over swine flu.
• Johann Hari defends Sasha Baron Cohen’s new cinematic creation, Bruno.
• In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens savages Gordon Brown & the Labour Party.
• Is North Korea helping Burma to go nuclear?
• Robert Manning considers the prospect of deglobalisation.
• Spencer Ackerman finds Daniel Pipes – one of Melanie…

I suspect I wouldn’t agree with CentreRight’s allonymous blogger Melanchthon on very much at all, but ever since ConHome gave him a platform for his unique brand of 16th century theology , he’s at least made for a consistently provocative read. Over the weekend, Melanchthon produced a right-wing critique of the Conservative Party’s ‘Broken Society’ rhetoric, arguing that the angle team Cameron has taken on social dysfunction is far too narrow and too focused on playing to the…

Nothing brings Britain’s social problems into focus like seeing them on your doorstep. What might seem abstract when described in Home Office documents or reported from unfamiliar places becomes a lot more intimate when it’s set somewhere you know: full of landmarks you’ve visited, people you might’ve met, folks who speak with the same accent or walk the same streets as you.

So when I read Mark Townsend’s report on the rise of gun & gang culture around the Burngreave & Pitsmoor areas of…

A few days ago, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the NAACP , Barack Obama stood before a room packed with African American supporters and reflected on how far the civil rights movement – and the country as a whole – had come in such a short century:

From the beginning, these founders understood how change would come — just as King and all the civil rights giants did later. They understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation…