Author: Mick Hartley

09/simplistic_enli.html”>Garton Ash and Buruma:

Ali’s own story has been told in countless profiles and interviews. In fact, she is irresistible copy for journalists, being a tall, strikingly beautiful, exotic, brave, outspoken woman with a remarkable life story, now living under permanent threat of being slaughtered like van Gogh. Among the many awards listed on the back cover of her new book of essays, The Caged Virgin, next to the Moral Courage Award, the International Network of Liberal Women Freedom Prize, Dutchman [sic] of the Year 2004, the Coq d’Honneur 2004, and the Danish Freedom Prize, is Glamour magazine’s Hero of the Month Award. That’s how we like our heroes—glamorous. It’s no disrespect to Ms. Ali to suggest that if she had been short, squat, and squinting, her story and views might not be so closely attended to.

But at least she wouldn’t have been patronised.

“no evidence of a main street bias”.

Professor Spagat says the Lancet paper contains misrepresentations of mortality figures suggested by other organisations, an inaccurate graph, the use of the word “casualties” to mean deaths rather than deaths plus injuries, and the perplexing finding that child deaths have fallen. Using the “three-to-one rule” – the idea that for every death, there are three injuries – there should be close to two million Iraqis seeking hospital treatment, which does not tally with hospital reports.

“The authors ignore contrary evidence, cherry-pick and manipulate supporting evidence and evade inconvenient questions,” contends Professor Spagat, who believes the paper was poorly reviewed. “They published a sampling methodology that can overestimate deaths by a wide margin but respond to criticism by claiming that they did not actually follow the procedures that they stated.” The paper had “no scientific standing”. Did he rule out the possibility of fraud? “No.”

How does HIV spread so quickly in Africa? – asks Steve Sailor, via Andrew Sullivan.

Another contributor to the high rates of AIDS in Southern/Eastern Africa besides multiple concurrent partners and lack of circumcision is the bizarre fetish for “dry sex,” which I would guess doesn’t exist among West Africans because (thankfully) you never hear about it among their African-American cousins.

Dry sex? – asks a mystified Sullivan.

Yes indeed, dry sex.

One of my more popular posts in terms of Google searches. Can’t think why.

Yes, the eclipse of the moon was wonderful, with a cloudless sky and all. Still, these pictures don’t really do it justice. Nor does the emphasis on the red colour. Yes, with the naked eye it looked a dull red during totality, which was certainly strange and quite beautiful. But that wasn’t what was so remarkable about it for me.

The most amazing thing was, looking through binoculars, the sheer three-dimensionality of it. We’re so used to seeing the moon with the sun full on, as a white two-dimensional figure which changes shape, waxes and wanes. Last night the lower intensity showed the moon in all its solidity: seeing it, literally, in a new light. Suddenly it was, “Jesus Christ, there’s a huge great ball of rock, up there in the sky!” You could see the curve of it, the depth of it. To me that was far more spectacular than watching it turn a dull red.

adow, wrote the seminal paper on salt-poisoning. Meadow did not give evidence in the trials of the Gays, but he laid the intellectual groundwork for the prosecutions. His paper on salt-poisoning, like his work on cot deaths, is dross. Jean Golding, professor of epidemiology at Bristol University, has compared Meadow’s scientific method to “stamp-collecting”.

The system’s second mistake is its failure to ask whether a crime took place. The attorney-general should spare time to read the notes of the original meeting of the experts, chaired by the crown’s junior barrister, Andrew Lockhart, before the first trial of the Gays. Nowhere does anyone ask, “are we absolutely certain that we have properly ruled out natural causes?” Instead, foul play was assumed….

The system’s third mistake is to overvalue expert witnesses as demigods and write off friends and family as irrelevant. At the first trial, the crown’s lead expert on salt-poisoning was Professor George Haycock of Guy’s hospital. He did the calculations that said the Gays must have poisoned Christian with 4 teaspoons of salt. The Gays were convicted.

Enter Dr Glyn Walters, a retired chemical pathologist. He is an oldie with two hearing aids, but cross him at your peril. His calculations said: natural causes, a faulty or reset osmostat. Haycock told the Court of Appeal that he couldn’t knock down Walters’s numbers. The Gays were freed — but then told by the court that they had to face a retrial.

At no time did the crown ever put any weight on the good character of the Gays and their families. I got to know all of them a little after they were freed from prison. Their families are all patently good people. Ian and Angela are gentle and caring. She lost her womb to cancer when she was 16. That’s why they wanted to adopt.

How could it be that the expert Professor Haycock was relied upon so heavily at the first trial but dropped by the prosecution for the second? Meanwhile, the views of a score of the Gays’ family and friends were discounted at both trials. Could it be that one is a middle-class professor and the rest people with Black Country accents?

When a child dies of abuse, and the authorities have been judged to have bungled, all hell is let loose. A public inquiry often follows. But when the opposite wrong happens — a child dies of natural causes and their parents (natural or adopted) are falsely accused — nothing much takes place. So long as the system remains convinced that it hasn’t done anything wrong, we can be pretty confident that someone else will end up in prison for a crime that never happened.

I don’t think the bright shiny world of multicultural Britain was meant to include this kind of thing. From the Times:

Radical Muslims are being accused of blackmailing young Hindu and Sikh women into changing religion in “groomed conversions” on campuses.

The men aggressively target vulnerable university students by using the fear of being dishonoured to force them to convert, community leaders have told The Times. Many befriend their victims, then threaten to tell their families that they are in a sexual relationship with a Muslim. Some teenagers are said to have been drugged and photographed in compromising positions.

Many comply because they are so afraid of shaming their parents or being rejected by their communities.

Police are aware of the problem. Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, recently attended a Hindu conference where the issue was raised. But police are powerless to act unless incidents are reported. This rarely happens because the stigma of a child converting to Islam often silences Sikh and Hindu parents.

Community elders say that the practice is widespread but their estimates vary from 100 annual incidents nationwide to 120 in the past few months in the South East alone.

One woman’s story is here.

refused offers for high profile Italian TV appearances because “I don’t want to encourage anti-Semitic exploitation of my research.”

Too late, unfortunately. Egyptian researcher Muhammad Al-Buheiri appeared on Nile Culture TV last week to offer some thoughts:

Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “Let’s not forget that the West in its entirety globally celebrated Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. So why shouldn’t we do the same? I called for a Nobel Prize to be awarded to the Israeli Jewish historian, the son of the chief rabbi of Rome…”

Interviewer: “He’s the son of the chief rabbi of Italy…”

Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “He’s the son of the chief rabbi of Rome, who is still alive at 90 years of age.”

Interviewer: “He wrote Bloody Passover, the book we are discussing.”

Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “This man proved scientifically and objectively… He’s an academic, who heads the department of Jewish history at the Israeli Bar-Ilan University. We are not talking about an amateur, a fraud, or someone looking to get famous. We are talking about an academic, who follows scientific and objective principles. He reached the conclusion that there was indeed a group of extremist Jews, who used to slaughter Christian children, and to collect their blood in order to make the Passover matza. It had to be a child who had not reached puberty. They would abduct him, and put him into a barrel designed for this purpose, which had holes in the sides at the place of the arteries. They would insert iron skewers through the barrel, and make the boy’s blood flow that way. Then they would collect the blood, and use it for Passover. Some sources in Jewish halacha say that preparing a single matza on Passover this way is sufficient for all the Jews. Others believe that such matzos should be prepared in each country separately.”

Interviewer: “They sacrifice Christian children… When was it? In what century?”

Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “It has been substantiated since the Middle Ages.”

Interviewer: “Since then?”

Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “Yes.”

Interviewer: “My question is: Until when did it happen?”

Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “That is the question we must ask. Have the Jews, with all their extremists, especially in Israel, given up… Have they given up these customs and religious rituals, which are important to them? There were very many cases. There were similar cases in Syria. There were similar cases in 1700 and 1800. Such children were abducted.”

Interviewer: “I have another question. Who are the people who prepare these matzos? Are they Jewish extremists or moderates? As a researcher specializing in inter-faith dialogue, do you believe this still occurs in Israel? I’m rephrasing the question.”

Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “I believe it does, because these are religious rituals.”

ants Darfur in flames because it allows him to blame his internal troubles on Khartoum. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir wants it because it is the best possible pretext for not implementing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement concluded with South Sudan, an agreement that obliges Khartoum to share both wealth and power.

The UN’s acting emergency relief coordinator for Darfur, Margareta Wahlstrom, said recently that Darfur is becoming one of the most dangerous areas in the world for aid workers. With more than a third of Darfur’s war-affected population – almost 1 million people – effectively out of bounds to aid agencies, aid workers are themselves now coming under direct and deliberate attack. Attacks on aid workers almost doubled in 2006. In December alone, hundreds were withdrawn from Darfur for their own safety.

Andrew Natsios, the US special envoy to Sudan, has said he fears that aid groups could be forced out of Darfur, opening the way for a “bloodbath” in which the government-sponsored Janjaweed militias would try to close down camps that give refuge to millions. Natsios said US diplomacy would focus on protecting the humanitarian aid effort in Darfur. How? The AU has proved incapable of doing this and there is no agreement yet, and may never be, on a tougher hybrid force.

The only possible solution lies in going back to the drawing board and seeking a political settlement that involves all those who are a party to the conflict – inside and outside Sudan. There are no shortcuts, and it may well be that there will be no solution for a very long time: All the key elements are moving in the wrong direction today. The international players made mistakes, bad mistakes, and didn’t care enough when all was said and done. But if the leaders of the parties, government and rebel, don’t want peace they can’t be forced to make it. The responsibility, at the end of the days, is theirs.

medical evidence which said the high salt levels were natural.

Prosecutors at Nottingham Crown Court had claimed the couple had force-fed salt to the boy as a form of punishment.

But the pair’s defence team argued a rare medical condition caused Christian’s body to store toxic levels of salt.

Two years ago the couple were jailed for five years after being convicted of manslaughter.

They served 15 months of that sentence before a retrial was ordered in April last year and the couple were released on bail.

Some background to the case here. Afficionados of dodgy prosecutions of supposed child killers will be unsurprised to find the figure of Sir Roy Meadow lurking in the shadows.

Jonathan Miller on the joys of sculpting with metal:

Speaking of the enjoyment he derived from welding the scrap metal, he said: “I love getting stripped to my waist. I love putting on a visor and letting all the sparks fly with a great big welding torch. Then going off for a big breakfast with a handyman. It’s undeniably a macho thing.”

I’m not sure macho is the word we’re looking for here.