Sometimes you happen on interesting sites by accident and you want to point them out. I want to point out this one, belonging to Nasim Fekrat.

My name is Nasim Fekrat and I’m 25 years old. I born in the land of pain and injustice. Whatever I want for myself, I wish for the others. I write from Kabul. I write what I see and what I hear. I am the winner of the in 2005 Freedom of Expression Blog Awards of RSF (Reporters without Borders) – France among seven Bloggers throughout the world. I am obviously a defender of freedom of expression and independent media free of threats and intimidation. I want to highlight the problems of my

Norm’s favourite English-language novels vote is in. I was very pleased to see Austen lead the pack by a wide margin. So she should. There is no one who can touch her for what I can only call perfection – for ruthless avoidance of flab, gas, wind, padding, self-indulgence; of bad writing; of sentimentality; of sententiousness; of overt lecturing; of sloppiness. There’s a power, a muscularity, a cold authority to her writing that makes a lot of male writers look feeble indeed. She’s widely supposed to be a narrow genteel nostalgic peddler of romances; well, Dickens and Thackeray and Hardy should only have been so lucky to have the force and strength of pen that she had. She and Emily … Read the rest

Let me get this straight – a guy has some video evidence that his wife and her sister were in the company of some men when he wasn’t there, and so they’re going to be executed? That’s the deal? Yes, that’s the deal.

Two Iranian sisters convicted of adultery face being stoned to death after the supreme court upheld the death sentences against them, the Etemad newspaper reported. The two sisters were found guilty of adultery – a capital crime in Islamic Iran – after the husband of one of the pair presented video evidence showing them in the company of other men while he was away.

It’s not even video evidence that they were having sex with the … Read the rest

There’s just no end to the joys of fundamentalism, is there. Health, hygiene, avoidance of untreatable illness and death, adherence to established rational medical norms? As nothing in the balance compared to what is said to be ‘a basic tenet of Islam’ – no matter how stupid, trivial, pettifogging, mindless, exaggerated, plain bloody absurd the ‘basic tenet’ is. This should (again) be something out of The Onion but apparently isn’t.

Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion. Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves