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.

I have been reliably informed that it may get a little warm over the next few months, which means my humble abode will turn into an oven. I need to figure out a cooling solution pronto.

I threw out the old fan this winter, and the quesition is should it be replaced by another fan or by something fancier?

Anyone have any fancy cooling solutions that are cheap, cheerful and effective?

Geek factor is always a bonus.

There is an article in the Guardian today about Park View academy in Birmingham where there are allegations of a "Muslim plot" to take over schools.

To me this story seems to be just another in the line of trying to muddy the waters about Muslims and to tarnish out collective reputations.

The real story? Park View Academy has managed to turn itself from a failing school where single digit figures were passing their GCSE's into a school which has become a beacon of achievement, where others want to emulate this success.

People that visit this site regularly may have noticed that the fonts have recently been updated on here.

The main considerations for using fonts on this site are that they should:

Because, you know, the rest of the world didnt know abducting school girls was wrong.

For those not following along, in Nigeria, a group of morons called Boko Haram, who in the past have campaigned against things like teaching children about the water cycle, considering it shirk, have abducted a few hundred school girls who they are using as slaves and worse.

(their "justification"/excuse for their moronic acts? for the past two years the government has been arresting their wives and daughters for links to them and they have been publicly threatening this as retaliation since unless the government stops.)

There was an article in the Guardian today where it was mentioned that the government is looking into ways of providing interest free student loans to those Muslim students who wish to untilise the service.

They wouldn't be any cheaper, but they would get past the issue of forcing people to choose between getting educated and paying interest.

The surprising bit to me was the Muslim students mentioned in there who did not want such an option to exist for others to use.

A few days ago a bug was found in some common infrastructure used throughout the internet which meant that more or less no site was secure to the bug. It is known as the Heartbleed bug. (further simplified details via BBC News)

An attacker aware of the bug could more or less hack anything on the net including government/tax portals and all banks to social networks to email providers to shopping sites. From the BBC News link:

Security expert Brue Schneier described it as "catastrophic". "On the scale of one to 10, this is an 11."

I'm not sure if many people are following this, but recently there has been a civil war of sorts going in turkey, with control of the government at stake.

It's big news, especially as Turkey has recently been one of the Muslim countries in the world where Muslims have been doing well - doing the right thing and being prosperous. So much so that I am a big fan of the Turkish Prime Minister - Recep Tayyip Erdogan in my books is the finest Muslim leader of the last decade.

However, there is trouble brewing in Turkey right now with his government being accused of many crimes including corruption.

There is a lot of history to this, but the current bombshells could result in the current government falling and maybe even a return to the dark past.

Big news this weekends is that the government will not benefit from raising tuition fees by £6000 at the start of this parliament a few years ago.

The math they did was that as long as they had to write off less then around 48% of student loans, they would be better off. Now it seems already they have to write off around 45%, and that figure keeps rising.

Bigger News is that the Lib Dems, who campaigned against tuition fees and then said they had to change their mind to save the government some money are proven wrong.

There is a story that has been doing the rounds for the last couple or so weeks about how certain segments of Muslims in Birmingham are trying to "take over" state schools in Birmingham.

This was all based on a document that was found outlining a "Trojan Horse" style conspiracy which allegedly suggested that muslims should underhandedly sabotage schools to remove their head teachers etc.

The claims ranged from exposing teacher collusion in exams in a top accademy to sabotaging ofsted inspections to discredit the school, with the aim of "regime change" so that the schools can be taken over to have a more conservative outlook.