The Guardian reported last Friday that George Galloway is angry at the BBC.
George Galloway has hit out at the BBC following his appearance on Question Time, saying he was set up and that David Dimbleby privately apologised to him afterwards.
The controversy centred around a question that one audience member asked about a rise in antisemitism in the UK. [Read more…]
The Twitter account @GlobalCivility has a lot of tweets about that terrible “global civility” protest in Downing Street yesterday. I followed Raquel’s example and asked if they’d be protesting things like the flogging of Raif and Boko Haram massacres and mobs killing alleged “blasphemers” in Pakistan. It took them maybe 10 seconds to block me.
Global Civility @GlobalCivility · Feb 8
Demonstrating our love
This is awesome. A pro-vax social justice campaign with inspiring art behind it. Ironic that the article is at the Huffington Post, but anyway…
Beloved portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz often captures celebrity subjects before her noted lens, having snapped cultural icons ranging from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
Her most recent photograph, however, depicts a different sort of notable figures, those linked to the development of several life-saving vaccines. The image is part of the vaccination awareness campaign “The Art of Saving a Life (ASAL),” which, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, commissioned creative works from artists, writers and musicians, exhibiting the many ways vaccines have
positively impacted[helped people in recent] history.
They help children grow up with parents, for one thing. [Read more…]
On the Media did a great segment on anti-vax this week. You should listen to it to get Bob Garfield’s biting tone, but I want to hit the highlights anyway.
CLIP: “The measles outbreak spreads to a fifth bay area county. One local pediatrician accuses vaccination opponents of undermining a basic survival concept…
BOB: Yes they did, which is why this outbreak was literally inevitable. The Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine had essentially eradicated those childhood diseases in the United States, but when parents began to stop vaccinating their kids, they were creating not just potential patients, but vectors, spreading the disease to the vulnerable. Such as the babies, pre-vaccination age, infected this week in a Chicago day care center.
Raquel Saraswati posted some photos from that “shut up” protest in London yesterday, along with some (cough) skeptical comments.
Raquel E Saraswati @RaquelEvita 21 hours ago
That awkward moment when these guys in London used freedom of speech to protest against freedom of speech today.
More from Greg Epstein on the Harvard Humanist of the Year award to Anita Sarkeesian.
Greg Epstein @gregmepstein 23 hours ago
Loved hosting @femfreq, our @HarvardHumanist of 2014 awardee. Humanism requires feminism; feminism=good f/all genders
The Wiltshire police explained that all they were doing was making an assessment of community tensions for the purpose of stamping them out. That’s all. Kindly meant. No harm done. Clear off out of it.
Wiltshire Police has now confirmed that an officer did visit a local shop in Corsham to request the names of those who had purchased the copies of the magazine and issued an apology “to the members of the public who may be affected by this”.
A Wiltshire Police spokesman said: “Following the terrorism incident in Paris, France on 7 January 2015, Wiltshire Police undertook an assessment of community tensions across the county.
Ah yes, that’ll be the problem. When British Authority undertakes an assessment of community tensions, it always does so with an eye to telling everyone to shut entirely up about Islam and its prophet. That seems to be all it can think of to do. If Hitler came back they’d tell everyone to shut up about Nazism, so they would. [Read more…]
Your offer of commemorative badges in support of journalistic freedomhighlighting “Je suis Charlie”, prompts me to suggest a degree of caution following my experience. Tongue in cheek, I asked my helpful newsagents to obtain a copy of the edition of Charlie Hebdo issued after the dreadful massacre in Paris, if indeed a copy was ever available in north Wiltshire. To my surprise, a copy arrived last Wednesday week and although the standard of content in no way matches that of the Guardian I will cherish it. However, two days later a member of Her Majesty’s police service visited said newsagent, requesting the names of the four customers who had purchased Charlie Hebdo. So beware, your badges may attract police interest in your customers.
Anne Keat
Corsham, Wiltshire
The names. Since when do newsagents even take the names of people who buy newspapers or magazines from them? But much more to the point…wtf? Why did they ask?
They’ve apparently apologized now, but I still don’t know why they asked.
Ireland has ambitions to become another Pakistan, the Guardian reports.
The sale of the Charlie Hebdo magazine published after the Paris atrocity is threatening to become the first major test of the Irish Republic’s blasphemy law, Muslim representatives and secularists have warned.
Ireland’s Islamic Cultural Centre has said the presence of a depiction of the prophet Muhammad on the front page of the satirical publication, on sale now in Irish shops, is a clear breach of the country’s blasphemy legislation. [Read more…]
