Coming soon to a hospital near you:
A gown designed for female Muslim patients who wish to preserve their modesty for religious reasons is being introduced to hospitals in Lancashire.
The £12 outfits – made in Yorkshire – cover the entire head, neck and body, leaving just a slot for the eyes.
The burqua-style gowns come with trousers, two styles of head-dress and elasticated cuffs to prevent women’s arms from being revealed.
It’s one thing for Israel to be forced to play its home matches abroad in the Euro 2008 qualifiers because of security concerns, but this (scroll down), surely, is outrageous:
Tickets for today’s group E clash between Israel and Andorra in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, are available only at a sandwich shop in Amsterdam.
The De Goffert Stadium, which will host the match — moved from Israel because of trouble in the Middle East — declined to sell tickets because of security worries, so the Israeli FA turned to Sal Meijer’s sandwich shop, a kosher landmark in Amsterdam for 50 years.
Meijer said: “They like my food. They asked me from the embassy if I could sell tickets here and I said yes.”
The De Goffert stadium is refusing to sell tickets for an international match being staged there? The Times present the story as some kind of joke, but really, would this happen to any other country except Israel? And why couldn’t UEFA find a venue for the match which would actually sell tickets in the normal way? (Yes I know, Israel v. Andorra isn’t going to be pulling them in, but still…)
groups, the government is sending about 30,000 troops and police officers to Darfur, where they are joining forces with the rebel group that signed the peace deal.
These new forces, armed with expanded weapons stocks and backed by government planes making bombing runs, are augmenting the Janjaweed militias that already were raping, looting and killing their way through Darfur…..
Khames and three other witnesses, giving similar accounts, said they believed that government soldiers, Minnawi’s former rebels and the Janjaweed worked together in the attack on Deker, Korma and the surrounding areas. Some of the gunmen, they said, were in the green camouflaged uniforms of the Sudanese army, others in brown police uniforms. Some wore white turbans, others soldiers’ caps. Khames said he counted 10 Toyota Land Cruisers and four heavy trucks in Deker. The horses and camels numbered in the hundreds, he said.
Deker had been attacked by Janjaweed once during the war, Khames said, but never before had he seen the uniforms of his own country’s soldiers.
Memories of the Cultural Revolution:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for liberal and secular university lecturers to be removed.
He told a group of students that they should organise campaigns to demand that the liberal teachers be sacked.
Mr Ahmadinejad said it was difficult to alter secular influences that had been in place in Iran for 150 years, but added that such a change had begun…..
“A student must yell against liberal thoughts and the liberal economy,” the AFP news agency reported Mr Ahmadinejad as saying.
“A student must ask why a secular teacher gives low marks to a student that does not have the same ideas as him.”
Last year, an ayatollah was appointed to run Tehran University, sparking protests by students.
Earlier this year, dozens of liberal professors and teachers were retired.
ndent for Ashour, the Christian TV broadcaster, wearing the map is her way of making a political protest.
“Officials now speak in the name of their sects, not in the name of the country,” she said. “Whenever I say my name and people say, ‘Oh, you must be Christian,’ I show my pendant and say: ‘I’m Iraqi.”‘
Michael says when people see her necklace they give her a thumbs-up and say “Afiya,” which loosely translates as “Bravo.” Her mother urged her to stop wearing it after Bahjat’s slaying and after the February kidnapping of another female TV correspondent, Reem Zaeed, who also was wearing a map necklace when she was snatched. Her whereabouts remain unknown.
“But I refuse to take it off,” Michael said. “They will be taking it off my body after I die.”
the household which is presided over by a stranger, it will be impossible to bring her up as a proper Muslim female. Indeed, the environment is likely to destroy and erode the moral fibre of her life.”
And of course that’s the most important thing – to bring her up as a “proper Muslim female”.
All that the recent much-touted peace deal in Nigeria seems to have achieved is to co-opt one of the rebel leaders – Minni Minnawi of the SLA – onto the side of the Khartoum regime:
Helicopter gunships thudded over the dusty streets of El Fasher in North Darfur this weekend as the Sudanese government stepped up its latest offensive in defiance of a United Nations resolution.
John Prendergast, of the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organisation that reports on conflicts, described seeing burnt-out villages and speaking to refugees who had been attacked by roving bands of heavily armed men in pick-up trucks.
“Humanitarian access has shrunk dramatically in the last two months, violence has increased and on top of that already gloomy picture we have a fresh offensive,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and 2m displaced since African rebels took up arms in 2003 to protest against perceived bias from a government dominated by Arabic-speakers. Sudanese government forces armed and organised Arabic-speaking tribes into the Janjaweed militias, which raped, tortured and murdered countless civilians.
A series of peace deals has failed to hold. Minni Minnawi, one of the rebel leaders, signed the latest one in May under intense pressure from American officials, but leaders of two other factions refused.
In an echo of the divide-and-rule tactics that claimed 2m lives during Sudan’s bloody civil war in the south, Minnawi’s soldiers have since been persuaded to join forces with the government and are now fighting their former allies. Last Friday their new uniforms filled the streets of El Fasher and foreigners were warned to stay indoors.
be a sincere party to any bilateral or international agreement.
This is why, leaving aside commercial issues, negotiations between the Islamic Republic and other nations never produce concrete and lasting results. There cannot be give-and-take between “an extension of God” and an “illegitimate and oppressive regimes” that keep the whole of mankind, outside Iran of course, in “utter darkness.”
It is important that those who recommend endless talks with the mullahs, including United Nations’ Secretary-General Kofi Annan who is visiting Tehran, keep that in mind.
e my mother and my aunties who were basically turned into prisoners in their own homes, and I thought – I can’t live that life.” Her mother had been a university lecturer until, at the age of 22, she was married off and turned into a housebound baby-machine. […]
Shazia Mirza is not going to run away, and she is not going to settle for a life as chattel to some oaf-husband. She is going to stand and fight with the weapon that dissolves the absurdities of religious fanaticism better than any other: ridicule. So when are we going to start standing up for her, and the tens of thousands of Muslim women in our city who aren’t going to take it any more?