There seems to be a lot of rumour going around at the moment and its important to look at the facts.

Since a few days there has been word of mouth information being passed arouns about Cadbury's chocolate being haraam. Some word of mouth has developed further - "all those chocolates found with a red dot on the packet are haraam, those without are allowed", and stories of "Muslims declaring jihad on Cadbury's".

As always, there is rarely smoke without fire and all these stories must have started somewhere.

The smoke is from a story in Malaysia. In Malaysia, a Muslim country, there are tests carried out on products to confirm their suitability for Muslims.

On Friday, a teenager named Michael Piggin walked free from court when the jury at a second trial failed to reach a verdict. The prosecutors have stated they will not seek a retrial.

You can read more about it in this article which gives further details of the trial and what Michael Piggin was accused of:

...planning to carry out a murderous attack on his former school, a cinema, a mosque and a council office near his home in the Midlands.

Piggin had earlier pleaded guilty to stockpiling weapons, including petrol bombs and component parts of pipe bombs, but consistently denied he intended to carry out an attack.

New leaks in the Guardian suggest that 6 schools in Birmingham will face censure, and two previously considered to be outstanding schools will be rated as "inadequate" - a rating that allowed the government to place the schools under special measures and force changes including replacing of school governors.

These schools were among 21 investigated as part of a "Trojan Horse" plot, where the leaks suggest that nothing has been found:

Ofsted's inspectors appear to have been unable to find much evidence of claims of homophobia or gender discrimination, which have been alleged by anonymous former teachers at some of the schools.

I turned off a few features on the site a few days ago and since them the site seems to be performant.

(for the techy crowd, I turned off the nodejs integration. I think following an upgrade of nodejs, the site was experiencing some database locking which was then mushrooming into a more or less unusable site).

If you are still experiencing issues, please post them in comments.
 

">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk1rsVCF8N0]

">http://vimeo.com/96120681]

The local elections are being broadcast as a real breakthrough for UKIP.

Out of approximately 3,500 contested council seats, so far they have gained around 150.

That is 4%.

They are expected to do way better in the EU elections, but their achievements in the Local elections shouldn't be over stated.

Another interesting tidbit is that UKIP have made no headway in London. I suspect that this is because London is actually multicultural and the people dont mind, whereas places with less immigrants have more fears about mlticulturalism and immigration.

Saying that though, their rise is another sign of the tides of racist britain.

 ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOOWPFfyyiU&feature=youtu.beURL]

I try to avoid making topics about Israel because the wider Muslim world is in conflict and Israel can be dealt with once the rest is sorted out.

But this event isnt something "minor" like demolishing houses, harrasment or exclusion. It is murder of children. You can watch the cold blooded murder in the video available on The Guardian Website.

Anyone watching the video can see the lie in the IDF "explanation" that is also mentioned by The Guardian in an accompanying article:

Today news arrives that the 31 year old father of two Mr Mashudur Choudhry has been convicted of terrorism related offences for going to fight in Syria.

Syria is currently a mess and going to fight there may be a bad idea especially as allegiances of different groups are murky and chances are people you consider on your own side will be trying to kill you for fighting with another group. Or worse you will be forced to work with groups carrying out attrocities and other crime.

However I do not think that it should be a criminal offence for people to go to Syria, even if to fight and any anti terrorism laws that make this a criminal offence are wrong.