From The Guardian

Teacher on blasphemy charge over 'Muhammad' teddy bear
James Sturcke and agencies
Monday November 26, 2007

A British primary school teacher has been arrested in Sudan accused of blasphemy for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad, it emerged today.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, was arrested yesterday at her home inside Unity high school, a British international school, after a number of parents made a complaint to Sudan's education ministry.

The school's director, Robert Boulos, said Gibbons had since been charged with blasphemy, an offence he said was punishable with up to three months in prison and a fine.

Gibbons's colleagues told Reuters they feared for her safety after receiving reports that young men had already started gathering outside the Khartoum police station where she was being held.

Boulos said Gibbons was following a national curriculum course designed to teach young pupils about animals and their habitats. This year's animal was the bear.[snip]

Boulos said he had decided to close down the school until January for fear of reprisals in Sudan's predominantly Muslim capital. "This is a very sensitive issue," he said.

"We are very worried about her safety," he added. "This was a completely innocent mistake. Miss Gibbons would have never wanted to insult Islam."

Unity, an independent school founded in 1902, is governed by a board representing the main Christian denominations in Sudan but teaches both Christians and Muslims aged four to 18.

I've nicked the title of this piece from a book by JB Phillips that I read years ago. IIRC, his main premise is that we imagine our gods as being just like us,or like parts of us, such as the 'Inner Policeman' or the 'Managing Director'. I long ago left behind Christianity for this very reason. The Christian god is too small, and I couldn't find a way to enlarge him without removing the Old Testament from my Bible completely - thus not being Christian at all.

So what sort of god is so small-minded that She gives a shit what you name a teddy? I've said it before, but I'm not averse to repeating myself, so I'll say it again: how small must god be if She cares about the insults of humans? If He wants us to love him? I They need our praise?

Instead, it is us, using 'god' as an excuse to inflict our own petty concerns on others. A handy excuse for violence, intimidation and bullying of others.

All is One and One is God. So when we get stupid enough to get violent with eachother, THAT is when we are offending god. It's like sitting there while your leg tries to break off from your hip. That's why all religions emphasise love, underneath all the human errors in translation and made up stuff.

So everyone do what you like, so long as you don't harm anyone else (that's 'harm', not 'offend', because some people can be very nit-picky and prickly).

From BBC News:

UK's families put on fraud alert

Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing.

The Child Benefit data on them includes name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25 million people.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said there was no evidence the data had gone to criminals - but urged people to monitor bank accounts "for unusual activity".

The Conservatives described the incident as a "catastrophic" failure. [snip]

Now this is pretty serious stuff, and I'm one of the people affected. I certainly will be keeping a good eye on my bank account and my finances in general, and I'll be aware that my identity could be stolen at any time now, ever, even in the future when I'm dead - should this data fall into the wrong hands.

HOWEVER, I'm very suspicious at the way in which the media coverage seems to be designed to send us all into mass panic. On Breakfast we have presenter encouragin us to email in saying how worried we are. On Radio 1 we have a woman ranting irrationally that this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to her family (has she never heard of death?). Anyone would think the information was known to have been given to gangs of thugs intent on stealing children.

And meantime, sneakily overlooked, is the matter of why was this data being sent from one department to another in the first place? It was obviously required by a department that wouldn't normally need access to it. WHY?

Oooooh, how very eager I am to put my biometric data on file, so any government department can access it at will, handing it over to any criminal with a tame courier in the process!

Of course, honourable New Labour maintains that this was all down to one errant employee wilfully disregarding protocol. Nothing to do with governmental meddling even though this was surely the main cause of the error. HMRC has been in a complete mess ever since HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue combined in 2005. At the same time there were mass job losses, and we all know it's never the managers who go. In the course of the two years it has taken me to stop tax being taken from my dad's pension at source (he's not a tax payer), I have come across complete incompetence at all levels of HMRC - largely down to a system which breaks up jobs into their separate components. This means that no-one has responsibility for one task from start to finish - and thus no-one has to carry the can if the task is never completed. One of these 'components' is 'opening a letter'. I was honestly told once that 'it's registered on the computer that the letter has been received, but no one has dealt with it yet.' It was even implied that I was lucky the letter had been opened! Is it really surprising that an institution capable of such red-taped jobsworthiness can foul up so comprehensively?

Gordon Brown cannot pretend he doesn't know about this, because I wrote him a rather irate letter at the time putting him in the picture. So if anyone should carry the can, it is him (but of course, like the rest of New Labour, he doesn't respond to mail. And even Thatcher wasn't as discourteous as that).

I really hope this incident puts an end to the ID card proposals. It'll make a lifetime of looking over my shoulder (and my child's) worthwhile.

Sir Ian Blair's fingertips must be bleeding, he's clinging on to his job so desperately. What I don't understand is why top level government ministers keep on feeling the need to protect him.

Even if he personally had done nothing wrong, he appears to not to have grasped the concept that you can delegate actions but not repsonsibilities. He's at the top, all the orders are his, and he should know how well they are being carried out. If things go wrong and no one else is to blame, then he is. Systems failures are down to him because they are his systems.

But he did personally do wrong. When an innocent man was lying dead with multiple bullets in his head, he treated the family as a nuisance rather than as people who had a right to be angry and expect a grovelling apology and vast compensation. He impeded the investigation iinto the killing. He defended the actions of gunmen who were obviously out of control and in need of retraining (last I knew, one bullet to the brain was enough to disable anyone).

And now he is showing he is entirely without honour in not resigning.

Actually, he's just like the New Labour Government. No wonder they love him (that and their being in the bed with the Police anyway, what with their wish to make this a Police State).

Every year since I was a child I've worn a poppy for Remembrance. I think it is important to remember the sacrifices made for us by those who died in the two world wars: men who had no choice in the matter even if they'd wanted it. It also used to be about supporting a charity that looked after the elderly servicemen who had survived those conflicts. I remember the cinema advert where you heard the marching of jackboots through an English village, which then morphed into a collector shaking a tin. A vivid reminder of what those people prevented.

But those people are all dead or nearly dead now. Our soldiers don't fight to defend us any more. They attack other countries at the whim of the US. They aren't called up, they volunteer. Wearing a poppy is seen as an indication of 'support for our troops' rather than a sign of remembering our dead. Let's be clear, those dying in Afghanistan and Iraq aren't fighting for us, they are fighting for our cowardly politicians.

I don't want to give money to a charity that offers forces families the sort of services the government should be funding. Let young men look at the appalling way the troops are treated, the crappy equipment they are given, the substandard medical treatment they can expect, and the way they and their families will then be abandoned to their own devices. And then let them think twice before signing up to serve their country (pronounced USA).

Gordon Brown is just like the rest of the spineless, gutless leaders. If he hasn't got an army, he ain't gonna fight.

From BBC News:

Support for child chickenpox jabs

Vaccinating all children is the only way to prevent severe illness and death from chickenpox, researchers have said.

In one 13-month period in the UK and Irish Republic, there were six deaths and 112 cases of severe complications among children, they said.

Problems included blood poisoning and pneumonia and did not just affect those with other health problems, said teams including health experts from Scotland.

Ministers are awaiting a report on whether England should have a vaccine.

Chickenpox, caused by the varicella virus, is generally a mild infection and nine out of 10 cases happen in children under the age of 15.

However, rare but dangerous complications can happen in a small number of healthy children or those with other chronic health problems.

For every 1,000 children who catch chickenpox, on average between two and five of them will end up in hospital.

CHICKENPOX SYMPTOMS
Initially mild fever and headaches
Crops of red spots soon appear, which develop itchy fluid-filled central blisters
After a couple of days these scab over and dry up
In rare cases associated bacterial infection can lead to potentially fatal conditions, such as toxic shock syndrome
Other complications can include pneumonia, encephalitis and inflammation of the blood vessels

It should also be remembered that 1 in 10 cases will not be recognised due to lack of symptoms.

Various complications
Researchers from Health Protection Scotland and the universities of London and Bristol looked at cases over a 13-month period.

They found that the complications varied widely, with the most common being bacterial blood poisoning, pneumonia and encephalitis, and loss of muscle control.

Smaller numbers of patients suffered toxic shock syndrome or the "flesh-eating" infection necrotising fasciitis.

In total, there were six deaths, including one death of a baby in the womb.

The researchers, writing in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, concluded that the complications did not just happen in vulnerable children and that the only way to prevent them was to vaccinate all youngsters.

They wrote: "Universal vaccination would therefore be the only realistic option to prevent severe complications and deaths, as few, if any, could be identified as potentially preventable under the current UK policy."

Some of these serious complications could also be down to the lack of competence of medical staff. Often, staff are slow to recognise secondary infection: after all, even these researchers admit that it isn't chiken pox per se that causes these complications: it is usually secondary infections.

What isn't mentioned in this article also is that the average age of those suffering comlications is 3. This is an age when doctors often discount the concerns of mothers as they think they are being overprotective.

MMR extra

In an accompanying editorial, clinicians from Bristol Children's Hospital said that even if all children were not vaccinated, a smaller strategy of immunising teenagers who had not suffered the illness would prevent cases of severe disease in adults.

I've had chicken pox as an adult: it was the best illness I've ever had. I felt ill for a week, then had another three off while my spots disappeared (I was working with immunosuppressed patients at the time so I wasn't allowed back to work). Admittedly my boyfriend caught it then went on to have encephalitis, but that's the luck of the draw innit?

They said that one option for universal vaccination - adding the chickenpox jab to the existing MMR vaccine - might not win public support.

They also raised the possibility that rates of shingles, caused in adults by the same virus, might rise if all children were vaccinated against it.

Adults who have already suffered a bout of chickenpox do not usually develop it again, but the virus lives on in their nerves and if their immunity falls later in life, it can flare up as a painful rash.

However, living in households with children who have chickenpox acts as a "booster" to their immunity, and reduces the chances of a shingles attack.

Advice expected

Nigel Scott, from the Herpes Viruses Association, said: "If we had to choose between the two, we would advocate vaccinating the elderly, as shingles is far more likely to cause serious health problems in many more people than is chickenpox in the young.

"Any benefits to children from a chickenpox vaccine would have to be offset against any potential increase in adult chickenpox and shingles in the elderly.

"The effect on the whole population needs to be considered, not just one age group."

Many other countries routinely immunise their children against chickenpox, and the Department of Health is already considering whether this would be the right move.

A spokesman said: "The immunisation programme in England has been developed to meet the needs of the population and is based on independent scientific advice provided by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).

"JCVI has commissioned an expert sub-group to look at all the scientific and medical evidence on chickenpox vaccines, including this recently published paper, and it will provide advice in due course."

I'm old enough to remember before the measles vaccine. People were genuinely concerned when you got measles, because it was well-known that the complications could be severe. I remember having measles, it was horrible. As was mumps, which everyone knew could be dangerous for boys.

No one ever seemed to be worried about chicken pox until the vaccine was invented. It's one of those illnesses you get, and yes, sometimes things go wrong.

Surely it would be better to educate medical staff about the possibility of secondary infection in chicken pox, rather than vaccinate all our children in order to prevent 6 deaths a year (and for all we know, this could have been an exceptionally bad year)?

Here are the complications of the chicken pox vaccine (from the insert in the box):

Body As A Whole
Anaphylaxis in individuals with or without an allergic history.

Hemic and Lymphatic System
Thrombocytopenia.

Nervous/Psychiatric
Encephalitis; cerebrovascular accident; transverse myelitis; Guillain-Barré syndrome; Bell’s palsy; ataxia; non-febrile seizures; dizziness; paraesthesia.

Respiratory
Pharyngitis.

Skin
Stevens-Johnson syndrome; erythema multiforme; Henoch-Schänlein purpura; secondary bacterial infections of skin and soft tissue, including impetigo and cellulitis; herpes zoster.

Those 6 deaths are obviously a tragedy to those concerned. But shit happens. Things always go wrong for someone. Vaccinating the whole population seems a disproportionate response. Obviously, the vaccine producing pharmaceutical companies will think differently....

The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears
This book was a joy to read, a combination of philosophy and thriller across three separate lives. Manlius is a landowner in Gaul as the Roman empire is waning. Olivier is a poet patronised by one of the most powerful clerics of medieval times, as plague ravages Europe. Julien is a 1930s French historian whose research brings him into contact with both of their lives.

The three stories run in paralell, and each begins with the ending so that you immediately wonder 'how did that happen'? Pears' skill is such that I didn't see the ending coming, it really took me aback.

The weak point of the novel is that sometimes he cannot resist spelling out the similarities between the protagonists, even though it isn't necessary. It's as though he doesn't trust the reader to see how clever he is. On the other hand, the way that philosphy, gnosticism and other heresies are woven into the book is masterful. It becomes part of the story rather than an inserted lecture.

The whole book has you thinking and contemplating, and changing your opinion all the time. Even afterwards, I'm finding myself thinking about the different dilemmas that faced the characters. An excellent book.
(93/100)

Cell by Stephen King
A straightforward thriller and a real pageturner. I'd forgotten what a good writer Stephen King is: he's a very unobtrusive narrator.

One day a proportion of the population seems to go mad, and the madness seems to be connected to the use of their mobile phones. The story follows Clay as he tries to reach his son beofre he uses his mobile.

Yet would you believe it, slotted into what initially appears to be a zombie-type horror, is a thoughtful consideration of what it is to be human. Nice, but disappointing ending for me.
(80/100)

One Night at the Call Centre by Chetan Bhagat

This is a really lovely book, and it was a real surprise. It does what it says on the tin, looking at the lives of five friends (and the Major) during a nightshift at a call centre. Sam has been dumped by Priyankha. She is having an arranged marriage to an American. Esha wants to be a model. Radhika wants to be a good wife. Vroom doesn't really know what he wants apart from fast bikes, fast women and Esha.

Then comes a life-changing call - for all of them.

It's a really original book, but I felt it didn't need the insertion of the author in an attempt to make something magical seem more real. I can suspend my own disbelief, thank you very much!
(72/100)

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult
I've developed a morbid fascination with this author. I read all of hers I can, but I still don't see why she's so famous and well-reviewed.

This book looks at date-rape and its effect on the victim and her parents, and the perpetrator. Parts are really good. Trixie (victim) is a brilliant creation. Daniel (her father) is interesting but I could care less that he grew up in Alaska. Laura (her mum) is tedious and predictable.

If Picoult had stuck to the high-school bits more, and the investigation, and the interaction between Trixie and her friends (including Jason, her ex and her rapist) it would have been a much better book. The interweaving of Dante and comic books was interesting even. But I had to skip the last third of the book because of all the Alaska rubbish. For some reason Picoult feels she has to take us on a voyage through the US's minority cultures (like in Vanishing Acts). I wish she'd stop and get on with writing good stories.

And the 'twist' is obvious.
(40/100)