There is a story on BBC News today: a mother who cooperated with the police when she found out about her son, Yusuf Sarwar, had traveled to Syria to fight felt betrayed by his arrest and subsequent 12 years and 8 months sentence under the anti terrorism laws.

His mother Majida told the BBC she believed the sentence would discourage other Muslims from helping the police.

There is a question of how these returnees should be treated. Should they be incarcerated and seen as a problem? Surely they cannot be left alone, after coming back from carrying out "terrorist activities" abroad?

This site has moved to new servers.

There were a few problems on the day - for over 24 hours there wre login problems and then about an hour ago I managed to corrupt the database meaning that any posts in the 24 hours prior to this have been lost.

A few posts may be missing that were posted in the time between the previous backup and the database corruption.

Other than that I consider this to be a successful update to the server - it is way way way faster, and costs less.

On the bright side, I have set up automatic updates, so if anything happens we dont have to lose data all the way back to my last manual update (which this time was days, but in the past has been months).

Today I came across a piece on BBC News, "Lonely elderly flood Silver Line helpline with calls" where this 24 hour helpline has recieved over 300,000 calls within the first year of its operation, mostly from the elderly who feel lonely or isolated.

A question not raised or discussed in the article is why there are so many elderly that are lonely or isolated. This isnt just about those in care homes, but also those that live in their own homes, all alone.

All in the image.

It has now been a while that the politicised OFSTED has been looking to combat "Islamic extremism" in schools etc. They started off being critical of schools with 90+% muslim students not offering a "christian-style prayer" in the morning, and ended up alleging that a Christian church of England school was putting its students at risk of Islamic Extremism.

An issue that is often ignored is where does this extremism come from, where does it gain strength and who does it effect.

Many non Muslims consider extermism to be when Muslims go too deep into their religion. Its an understandable view for non Muslims because non Islamic books of scripture have been corrupted and there are extreme things in them.

But Islam is different.

The Mccarthy'istc witchhunt where previous recognised excellent schools are being accused of supporting or not protecting from Islamic extremism continued long after the departure of crusader in chief Michael Gove (who mysteriously wrote a book about trojan horses in schools years before a fabricated letter brought the idea into the mainstream).

The latest victim? another Muslim academy? no. Public school with Muslim board of trstees accused of manipulating it? no. It is a Church of England (of christian fame) being accused in relation to Islamic extremism.

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Kobane/Kobani in Syria next to the Turkish border and has for a couple of months now been under assault by SIS.

There has been immense international pressure on Turkey to intervene and when it didn't, mass accusations that it was aiding ISIS.

It has often been stated that Turkey is often a route used by westerners to get into Syria/Iraq and potentially join ISIS. Further "damning" evidence against Turkey is that potentially around 400 Turks have joined ISIS.

What is often ignored when quoting this number is that there are more suspected britons (500) of having joined ISIS that Turks (400) even though Turkey is a Muslim country and is right next to the theatre of operations.

I read something like this somewhere a few months ago.

Reputation is how other people see you. It is not necessarily true.

Character is who you really are.

The meaning I took was that you shouldn't fall for your reputation and if your character falls short of your reputation, chancs are one day you will be caught short. So we all need to improve our character to match or exceed our reputation.

I like the idea of an independent Scotland. I also think it would do quite well.

However I am from England and here IMO the impact would be quite negative for many people without the balancing hand that is provided by Scotland.

Something that the Scottish may like about voting yes is that they will never have a tory government. But that also means that cards will become stacked in favour of more tory governments in England (which may be a reason for conspiracy theories...)

But I still want Scotland to vote Yes for independence.