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In the News

  • Guardian: The Isis papers - leaked documents show how Isis is building its state
    December 7th, 2015
    A leaked internal Islamic State manual shows how the terrorist group has set about building a state in Iraq and Syria complete with government departments, a treasury and an economic programme for self-sufficiency, the Guardian can reveal.
     
    The 24-page document, obtained by the Guardian, sets out a blueprint for establishing foreign relations, a fully fledged propaganda operation, and centralised control over oil, gas and the other vital parts of the economy.
     
    The manual, written last year and entitled Principles in the administration of the Islamic State, lays bare Isis’s state-building aspirations and the ways in which it has managed to set itself apart as the richest and most destabilising jihadi group of the past 50 years.
  • Guardian: 'Dark ages' warning issued over freedom of information changes
    December 7th, 2015
    Exempting advice given to ministers from freedom of information requests risks returning the UK to the “dark ages” of “private government”, the information commissioner has warned. Christopher Graham told a review into the legislation that changes to FoI being considered by a government commission could lead to a blanket ban on all advice being made available to the public.
     
    “The danger is the Whitehall machine might run more smoothly, [but] you are back to that world of private government which I don’t think fits with the 21st century,” Graham told the review, led by Labour deputy leader Tom Watson. “FoI is the price you pay for being a modern, accountable and efficient government in the 21st century.”
     
    Details of advice given to ministers can be withheld if it is deemed in the public interest to do so, but part of the government review is considering whether ministers need a “safe space” to discuss policy with advisers.
  • MRC TV: 52 year-old father lives as a 6 year-old girl
    December 7th, 2015
    Forget being transgender like Caitlyn Jenner or transracial like Rachel Dolezal, there’s a new “trans” frontier: people who are transage.
     
    In an interview with the gay news site The Daily Xtra, Stefonknee (formerly Paul) Wolscht details his struggles with being a male-to-female transgender person.
     
    The Daily Xtra video, however, glosses over a tiny bit of important information about Wolscht: he thinks he is actually a six year-old girl—not just a woman, but a six year-old girl—stuck in the body of a 50-something man.
     
    At age 46, Wolscht deserted his wife and his seven children to live his “true” life.
     
    “There’s days I forget my past,” Wolscht says. “I can actually go a week without even thinking about what was before.”
  • Life News: Shocking video shows patient begging to stay alive, but hospital is trying to kill him
    December 7th, 2015
    If you’re ailing and in a Texas hospital, who should decide if you have the right to live: you or a committee of hospital administrators?
     
    Right now, an American hero is fighting for his right to make that decision from his hospital bed at Houston Methodist Hospital.  David Christopher “Chris” Dunn is one of countless Texans who have been victimized by the draconian Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA), enacted by the Texas Legislature in 1999.  The law – which benefits the medical lobby and jeopardizes medically vulnerable Texans – protects the financial and discriminatory interests of hospitals and physicians by abrogating the civil liberties of patients.
     
    When a hospital or physician determines for any reason that they disagree with a patient’s decision about his or her own medical treatment and invokes TADA, Texas law protects those healthcare providers as they remove life-sustaining treatment from the patient even when doing so means overriding the patient’s desire and right to live—and even when the treatment is benefitting the patient. The law does not require that the hospital inform the patient or family about the reasons or basis for the removal of treatment, which could include financial reasons, discrimination, or subjective quality of life value judgments about the life of the patient.

    Chris, who has served Texas and the nation as an EMT, in the Harris County Sheriff’s office, and Homeland Security employee, received his death sentence when Methodist invoked the TADA statutory process last month.  After the hospital announced that care would be forcibly removed from Chris against his will, Chris’s family contacted Texas Right to Life, and, with legal aid, an extension of the ten-day waiting period was secured. (The law requires this ten-day period ostensibly to provide time for a patient to transfer to another facility that will accept him and follow his medical directive.)
  • Christian Today: The worst report I've ever read
    December 7th, 2015
    The world is confronted by a terrible evil. The evil is not Islam but the architects of the terror are building their temples out of the stolen bricks of this great religion.  
     
    This is a problem facing everyone in the country at the moment - teachers, journalists, clergy, mosques, churches, synagogues, humanists, Muslims, Christians. Everyone. We need to confront Islamophobia, of course, but we also need to confront the truth of what is happening. 
     
    As one of those called to give evidence to the Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life, I was deeply honoured. I was doing jury service at the time, and the judge in our trial at the Central Criminal Courts suspended the trial so I could attend. I should have declined the invitation and not wasted our court's time. Rarely have I been so disappointed by a work of the "great and the good".
     
    The commission sat for two years at Westminster Central Hall. Some of the most eminent people in the country were involved, in both hearing the evidence, as patrons and as witnesses. It sounds grand, but as the Christian Legal Centre has pointed out, it should not be confused with a public commission as it was privately-appointed.
  • Vice: An expert explains how social media can lead to the 'self-radicalization' of terrorists
    December 7th, 2015
    On Friday, it was revealed that Tashfeen Malik, the 29-year-old suspect at the center of last week's massacre in San Bernardino, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook just before the mass shooting that killed 14 and injured 21. The FBI promptly indicated it would be probing the attack as an act of terrorism, and agents are culling data from electronic devices obtained during a search of the home Malik shared with her husband and fellow alleged shooter, Syed Farook.
  • BBC: 'Spell-check for hate' needed, says Google's Schmidt
    December 7th, 2015
    Technology companies should work on tools to disrupt terrorism - such as creating a hate speech "spell-checker" - Google's chairman Eric Schmidt has said.
     
    Writing in the New York Times, Mr Schmidt said using technology to automatically filter-out extremist material would "de-escalate tensions on social media" and "remove videos before they spread".
     
    His essay comes as presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton again called on Silicon Valley to help tackle terrorism, specifically seeking tools to combat the so-called Islamic State.
     
    "We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS," she said during a speech in Washington DC.
     
    In the wake of the Paris attacks, companies and governments have clashed over how to handle the terrorism threat.
  • Spectator: Faith schools are now under attack from the interfaith community
    December 7th, 2015
    It’s depressing to read of yet another attack on faith schools in today’s papers, this time from a self-appointed ‘Commission’ set up by something called the Woolf Institute – an organisation dedicated to ‘interfaith research, teaching and dialogue’. It has just published a ‘report’ on ‘religion and belief in British public life’ called ‘Living with difference: community, diversity and the common good’.
     
    I will leave it to others to comment on the substance of the report, but at first glance it reads like a product of the ‘Thought for the Day’ school of theological discourse. In other words, the usual wishy-washy, Kumbuya, inter-faith bilge, overlaid with a thick layer of Jewish and Christian self-loathing, as well as craven praise for ‘the religion of peace’. Incredibly, one of its recommendations is to make ‘Thought for the Day’ more ‘diverse’ and include secular contributions, as well as religious ones. You can just imagine some hand-wringing, apologetic, liberal Bishop arguing on ‘Thought for the Day’ that ‘Thought for the Day’ has become too doctrinaire and sectarian – and isn’t ‘inclusive’ enough. God forbid that anyone listening to the religious slot on the nation’s flagship current affairs programme should come away with the idea that the speaker actually believes in anything – apart, that is, from the equal validity of all beliefs, which is adhered to with an Islamic State level of fanaticism.
  • BBC: Muslim school plan asks questions of education
    December 7th, 2015
    Should the Scottish government help to pay for a separate Muslim school in Glasgow?
     
    Campaigners are calling for Scottish government money to help an existing independent, fee-charging primary school expand into secondary education.
     
    They want the Al Qalam school in Pollokshields to receive direct funding from the Scottish government but opponents say councils are better placed to run education, especially if there is public money involved.
  • Express: BBC accused of 'diminishing religion'
    December 7th, 2015

    The BBC was last night accused of “enforced politically correct blindness” and “diminishing religion” for scheduling fewer than four hours of original Christian programming in more than 300 hours of shows over Christmas.

    In total, just eight hours of Christian-themed television, such as traditional carols and religious messages, is being aired over seven days, including Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 
     
    This is less than three per cent of the total and four hours of this are repeats.