I am posting this a good few months late, but better late than never eh?

A few months ago there was a twitterstorm after Richard Dawkins made the following tweet:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

Naturally many people jumped up in outrage at this. Others jumped up agreeing with him.

Most debate was about how current political situation impacts on the nobel prizes being given out. Not much was on how they are given out.

Big news from bangladesh today: they have executed someone! (link to BBC News article).

Abdul Kader Mullah was a senior leader in the Jamaat-e-islami party which back at the time of independence in fought for unity against independence... and lost. For context, tThe current PM calls the guy who led the independence movement daddy (and the former PM and leader of the opposition calls the man who executed him daddy).

Either way, there was never any process to reconcile the different factions in Bangladesh following independence, and everything was sort of hoofed away as there were many immediate issues to deal with straight away followed by many political upheavals and political coups.

This week the "Pakistani Taliban" (TTP for short) waded into a very serious issue for a second time. An issue more important than life and death for many people - Cricket.

The situation arose when the talented Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar retired and the press was pretty much unanimous that a cricketing great had retired.

Even the Pakistani press lavished him with praise and apparently this was too much for the TTP.

They decided to warn the Pakistani media against such a thing - after all, Sachin Tendulkar didn't play for Pakistan but for India! How dare the "corrupt media" lavish him with praise? this was "against the motherland" and probably treasonous.

This weekend more talks are underway to try to get some sort of deal with Iran in relation to its nuclear programmes. At the last round France had destroyed the chance of a settlement being reached.

While Iran has not made a concerted effort to produce nuclear warheads, it shouldn't write them off the table too easily.

Iran has a good reason to get a settlement - it (supposedly) stops the US from attacking and the cripling warlike sanctions imposed by the US but (at gunpoint) honoured by the rest of the world may be eased allowing some respite for the people.

However Iran should be wary as history repeats the tale of the nation which gave up something key as part of some grand bargain only for its enemies to destroy it shortly afterwards.

It may be hard to guess from the title, but something remarkable happened this week. No, it wasn't another episode of Harry Enfield.

Something that corrected 90 years of wrong.

90 years ago, the Turkish republic was declared. In 2013, the first deputies wearing headscarves were allowed in - and this time without much of a fuss either!

A couple of months after replacing my PC, I have got around to making a few more updates to the site - I had quite a bit left to do after the changes to the layout etc that ended in Ramadan, but I never got around to them.

Right now, I have added preliminary support for a couple more sizes - screens that were 320px wide (eg iphone and smaller android phones) were already supported, but there was much wasted space on slightly larger devices - those that had a default device width of 340 or 360 pixels were less well supported creating wasted space.

That should now be fixed. I am aware that on some pages the page is being "stretched", making the view zoomed out and less easy to read. That might be figured out.

I read this article on the BBC News website last night and it was quite shocking.

Congo had a sophisticated civilisation until the 15th/16th centuries when it started being exploited and has since been sent to dark places while other nations benefit from its resources.

I didn't know that so much of the weaponry used by the allies in WW2 had components that were take from Congo, or the level of interference the population had suffered.

A very good read.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is potentially one of the richest countries on earth, but colonialism, slavery and corruption have turned it into one of the poorest, writes historian Dan Snow.

Just floating an idea out there.

Normally most spam accounts created on here are easy to spot - they contain something obvious or the name is nonsensical enough to know that its spam.

But other times, its not so obvious. Here, either the account can be allowed and then at somepoint it might start to spam away, or worse be a "test" account to see if the site actually carries out any deterrence to remove spam accounts. Leaving it will give the green light to spammers to create more spam accounts.

The other option is to delete hard and fast, hoping that if a genuine account is accidentally deleted, the genuine account holder will create a new account and potentially kick up enough of a fuss for that to not happen again.

Following my previous post on the subject, it can be seen that the UK coalition government is focussing on the (non-existant) issue of the face veil, testing out waters over what they can get away with.

Today, the Health Minister Dan Poulter extending the witchhunt to the NHS - He publicly stated that "it should be up to the" GMC etc to decide if veils should be worn in hospitals etc.

The general elections may be one and a half years away but it seems that electioneering has started.

Until now the Coalition government has focussed on blaming the poor and vulnerable for the poor state of the economy while ignoring their rich friends which fund them and actually created the economic mess.

But now a new front has been opened up recently, as evidenced by a college's attempt to ban the face veil in Birmingham. While the college eventually backed down, it was not without first recieving the full backing of the Prime Minister.