Harry's Place

After Barack Obama’s reelection last November, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal declared that the GOP needed to “stop being the stupid party.”
“… It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults,” he said. “We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. I’m here to say [...]

Ishtiaq Hussain, a Whitehall civil servant and counter extremism expert, has been nominated for a British Muslim Award 2013 in the “Best Civil Servant” category.  This entry is based on votes from the public as part of a three month campaign operating and encouraging people to send in their votes. As well as his full-time [...]

Cross-posted from James Bloodworth at Obliged to Offend
One of the first political epiphanies I had occurred when I was ten years old. I was sat on the carpet in my Grandmother’s house as a speech by Mother Teresa was broadcast on the evening news. “Let us promise”, the saintly patron of Calcutta’s Convents told Ireland, [...]

I admit I am having difficulty seeing the objection to not permitting unmoderated taking of photographs in schools, but a synthetic outrage Twitter storm has started in response to nine year old Martha Payne doing so.
In May, Payne – or, more accurately, her father – launched a blog Never Seconds which carried a photo-diary of [...]

It’s not really the equivalent of reading “Lolita” in Tehran, but still…
Col. Gordon Ball, professor of English and fine arts at [Virginia Military Institute], will read from his new memoir, East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, Wednesday, April 25, at 7:45 p.m. in the Turman Room of VMI’s Preston Library. Ball will also show [...]

Writing for Left Foot Forward, Kim Allen (Academies Commission) and Henry Stewart (of Local Schools Network) argue for and against continued promotion of the academy programme respectively.
(This refers only to England, specifically not Wales. Individual Scottish schools may be referred nominally to as academies, but this dates from years past and includes primaries as [...]

Last year Brendan Barber’s raised concerns about a booklet with a strong anti-gay message which had been distributed to pupils at some Roman Catholic schools in Lancashire in 2010.
The booklet, “Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be”, discusses a boy dealing with “homosexual attractions” which it suggested may “stem from [...]

This is a cross-post from The Huffington Post
University Islamic Societies have been described as ‘conveyor belts‘ for extremism and terrorism. There may be some truth in this. After all, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, better known to you and I as the underwear bomber, who tried to make a martyr of himself by attempting to detonate a [...]

This is a guest post by Hadar Sela.
Concern is regularly expressed on these pages and elsewhere regarding the volatile situation in British universities surrounding the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the increasing blight of anti-Semitism on campus and the radicalisation of students by members of Islamist organisations. It seems, however, that these subjects are by [...]

I read about the marked drop in applications on the BBC news site yesterday.  There was a brief reference to it on the Today programme earlier this morning and, as they mentioned coverage in the Daily Mail, I looked quickly at that paper’s report.
There are plenty of reasons to object to the new fees regime, [...]