Harry’s Place

An Iranian dissident who has spent five years going through the UK’s shambolic asylum system decided that he couldn’t take it any longer and should try his luck with the US Embassy in London. He says:
‘You know I have been waiting for my asylum application for the last five years. The unreasonable reasons why the […]

Dan Brett blogs on the Amnesty site, on a campaign by the Iranian government to:
“intimidate, imprison and even execute writers and journalists from non-Persian ethnic groups in an attempt to remove the ethnic issue off the political agenda ahead of next year’s presidential elections.”
Read on to find out what you can do.

Wang Xiuying, left, and Wu Dianyuan: clearly dangerous enemies of the People’s Republic.
The New York Times reports:
Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.
The women, […]

If you ever doubted that George Galloway is nothing more than an anti-American power worshiper of the most craven sort, gather up your mental strength and read his latest column in The Daily Record.
GRACE, grandeur, spectacle …superlatives pale in the face of the Beijing opening ceremony.
Despite the best efforts of all the saboteurs, China is […]

Anti-Semitic incidents are up.
There was a 9% rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the UK in the first half of 2008 compared with the same period last year, a charity has reported.
There were 266 incidents up to June, compared with 244 last year, according to the Community Security Trust (CST).
Some 166 were incidents of abusive behaviour, […]

Guest post by davem
MEMRI has posted a translation of parts of interviews that Bashar Al-Assad (aka the Giraffe) gave to both Al Jazeera and Dubai Television.
Of course what doesn’t need to be said is that MEMRI’s translations are brilliant; in fact anyone with any appreciation of Arabic knows that these guys are the Zinedine Zidane […]

Bright, Bunglawala, and I are in agreement:
Two days ago I finally managed to find something written by Martin Bright that I could wholeheartedly agree with. Blogging about the capture of the war-crimes suspect, Radovan Karadzic, Bright said:
I have always believed that all British school children should be taught about the unique horror of the Srebrenica […]

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Serbia and will face charges of war crimes at the Hague Tribunal.
The UN says Mr Karadzic’s forces killed at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995 as part of a campaign to “terrorise and demoralise the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat […]

The World Association of Newspapers and The World Editors Forum have highlighted an pernicious attack on press freedom in Zimbabwe, set in motion last month by Robert Mugabe, but which has slipped under the radar.
He has imposed a “luxury tax” on imported newspapers.
The problem Mugabe’s regime faced was that - even after bringing the Zimbabwean […]

From the Southall Black Sisters
Demonstration 17th and 18th July 2008 from 9.30am onwards at the High Court on the Strand
Many of you are already aware that SBS has been locked in struggle against Ealing Council with regard to its decision to withdraw funding for our domestic violence services for black and minority women. On 17th […]