Harry's Place

This is a cross-post by Gita Sahgal from Open Democracy
Salman Rushdie has said, ‘When people are told that they cannot freely re-examine the stories of themselves, and the stories within which they live, then tyranny is not very far away’. Forty nine years ago, this week, Peter Benenson struck a blow against tyranny by announcing [...]

Writing in The Guardian today John McDonnell indicated that he might stand aside in the Labour leadership race to in order to ensure that fellow left winger Diane Abbott gets on to the ballot paper.
He was writing in response to a Jackie Ashtley piece (“Must women leaders all be childless fortysomethings?”) earlier this week where [...]

I guess it will be a first for Harry’s Place to publish two posts about what has been occurring in Arizona in such a short space of time, but I could not resist sharing this news story.
The Huffington Post has brought to my attention the campaign video issued by the friends of John McCain  in McCain’s [...]

I wasn’t sure I’d read this headline correctly, but Daniella Peled writing on Cif today has a post about how some of smartest and best educated people in Afghanistan, intellectuals and professionals, believe that the US is funding the Taliban as part of an effort to stay in the region and maintain its geopolitical influence [...]

Sometimes it’s important to be reminded that– no matter what their differences– despised minorities are, in the most basic sense, all in this together.

(Hat tip: Andrew Murphy)

This is a cross-post from Just Journalism

The Guardian’s front-page story, ‘Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons’, by Chris McGreal, was triggered by uncovered documents revealed in ‘The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa’,a newly published book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a senior editor at the New York-based Foreign [...]

This is a cross-post from Ministry of Truth
Last week’s ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day‘ generated a number of depressinging stupid responses; nowhere more so than in Pakistan where the government resorted to blocking access to Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and parts of Wikipedia in an effort to ‘protect’ its citizens from the heinous sight of several thousand [...]

On February 11, 1979 the Shah of Iran was deposed. On that day the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic cleric dominated Revolutionary Council gained control of Iran. Five days later, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, who had recently visited the Ayatollah in [...]

AP reports:
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in a southern port town has been marred by shouts from disenchanted Iranians demanding jobs.
Ahmadinejad on Monday addressed hundreds gathered in Khorramshahr — about 625 miles (1,000 kilometers) southwest of Tehran — when scores from the crowd interrupted his speech with shouts: “We are unemployed!”
The rare protest is unusual in [...]

Martin Gardner, the great debunker of pseudo-scientific nonsense and medical quackery, has died at 95.
His last piece appeared in the March-April 2010 edition of The Skeptical Inquirer, criticizing Oprah Winfrey for promoting dubious or even dangerous medical treatments and other bizarre “science” on her TV show.
Gardner was skilled at patiently, painstakingly and humorously demolishing [...]