The Paralympics are coming...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuAPPeRg3Nw&feature=g-logo-xit

flatbreads

ROTI
Serves 4
Ingredients
300g wholewheat flour
4 tsp rapeseed oil (or clarified butter)
300ml water
Half a tsp of salt
Plain flour for rolling
Method
Carefully sift the flour into a bowl. Add the oil and salt. Pour in the water and mix to form a soft dough.
On a floured surface, knead the dough well for a few minutes. Keep aside for half an hour and then knead again for a minute or two. Divide the dough into 12 equal portions.
Sprinkle a work surface liberally with flour and roll each portion out into a 15cm-diameter thin circle. Remove any excess flour and put aside. Heat a cast-iron griddle on a medium flame and slap the rolled circle on to the griddle. Cook lightly for 10 seconds or until one side browns and then flip the roti and cook the other side. If you like your rotis crispy, then toast quickly on an open flame with tongs. Serve hot and for a decadent touch, brush with butter before serving.
NAAN BREAD
Ingredients to make 4 naans
250g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sugar
Half a tsp salt
2 tbsp yoghurt
80ml whole milk
2 tbsp vegetable oil
Topping: caramelised onions, nigella seeds, fresh coriander or mint. (If you prefer you could even add fresh herbs, finely chopped, in the dough mix.)
Method
Sift the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in a mixing bowl. In another bowl mix together the milk with the vegetable oil.
Add the yoghurt to the sifted flour followed by the milk and oil. Mix everything together to make a soft, pliable dough. Turn out on the work surface and knead for five minutes until smooth. Place the dough back in the bowl, cover with cling film and rest it for 20 minutes or so in a warm place.
Preheat your oven grill to medium and place a baking tray on the top shelf of the oven. Turn the dough out and divide into four portions. Roll out quite thinly to a teardrop shape. Top each naan with coriander leaves or your preferred choice of topping and pat lightly into the naan. Prick the naan with a fork to make sure it doesn't rise.
Remove the baking tray from the oven; place the bread on it and return to the oven to cook for three minutes or until speckled lightly brown. Smear with butter and serve warm.
Recipe by Maunika Gowardhan; for more Indian recipes go to cookinacurry.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/rise-and-rise-of-flat-bread-how-to-bake-the-indian-way-7939605.html

'Britain is losing its sense of decency when it comes to the disabled'

• By Sharon Brennan
• Tuesday, 17 July 2012 at 4:00 am

Worcestershire county council has just announced its proposal to shut away disabled people in care homes for the rest of their lives – openly admitting that it is a policy based on finances not necessarily on the individual’s health or care needs.
Called the Maximum Expenditure Policy, the council has stated home care will be capped at the level of what it would cost for that person to live in a residential care unit. The disabled person would then be forced to live in a care home, or find private funding for his or her additional care needs.
The council’s consultation on this proposal fails to declare how many people this might effect, what the financial cap might be or if private funding or charitable support is at all feasible for the people it will effect.  However a new report, Past Caring, published by the research team at the WeareSpartacus campaign group, has estimated that people who need over six hours care a day, or three hours from two carers simultaneously, will be faced with spending the rest of their lives shut away, isolated from families, friends and with the prospect of employment extremely low.
If this were to happen, there couldn’t be a clearer confirmation that disabled people are now seen as second class citizens, so irrelevant to society that local communities no longer have need for them.
With the number of disabled hate crimes reported to the police up by 14 per cent since 2010, it seems that the constant cry of “scroungers” and “benefit cheats” has now permanently affected the public’s view of disabled people. Before we are even able to have a fair discussion on what should be cut and by how much, campaigners have a battle to convince people that the genuinely disabled neighbour, work colleague or distant family member they know is not an aberration but the norm. Stats published by the Department of Work and pensions show that the combined fraud level for both Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance is just 0.8 per cent, yet the battle is almost lost – disabled people are regarded with suspicion, viewed with sceptical eyes as to whether their illness really is as bad as they say. And so the cuts keep coming – the politicians recognising an easy target when they see one.
Charity after charity has implored the Government to rethink the cumulative effects of its cuts, showing that they fall disproportionately on disabled people, pushing a group, a third of which already live in poverty, into dire financial circumstances and social isolation. But the Government refuses to listen.
Back in February the House of Lords passed several amendments to the Welfare Bill which included increasing the time people are allowed to claim contributory-based Employment and Support Allowance (the new Incapacity Benefit) from one year to two. But the Government used an archaic parliamentary process called Financial Privilege to overturn these changes, sticking stubbornly to its agenda by declaring they couldn’t afford to fund the amendments.
However, by May money was suddenly found by Osborne to alleviate the impact of a Child Benefit cut for higher rate tax payers – pushing back the earning threshold from £43,000 to £60,000 before this benefit is removed completely. And only last week in Prime Minister’s Questions Cameron reiterated his commitment to not means testing free bus passes and winter heating allowances for pensioners. Apparently this is a Government that will appease its core electorate even at the cost of what is fair.
As a country we cannot ignore this ethical crisis any longer. Bar bringing in euthanasia, these cuts to the disabled will be felt on the public purse. The cost of appeals alone against incorrect Employment and allowance benefit decisions are estimated to be running at £80 million and rising. The NHS is already seeing the effect of a crisis in community care as 66 per cent of NHS managers polled report a rise in demand for health services as a result of local authority funding cuts.
And what of the moral implications? Much has been said recently of rebalancing society away from the greed of chasing money at any cost. We cannot rebuild a fairer Britain, with a sense of what is decent at the heart of our communities, if we willingly allow some of the most vulnerable people to be pummelled by politicians with policies that turn the clock back thirty years and cleanse our streets of disabled people. These are normal, decent people – it is you and your family if misfortune came your way.
Instead of outlawing this local council’s suggested moves, the Cabinet actually approved plans for the council to consult on this appalling proposal. No wonder the Government quietly announced a delay on the publication of its disability strategy, as clearly all its practical policies fly in the face of its apparent desire to allow disabled people to live “fulfilling” lives. If Worcestershire council gets away with this then a precedent will be set: as other councils look to manage their budget they will have received a clear signal that disabled people are not on anyone’s political agenda – do with them what you will.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/07/17/britain-is-losing-its-sense-of-decency-when-it-comes-to-the-disabled/

Articles on Islamophobia

We mustn't allow Muslims in public life to be silenced

Even in polite society, fear-mongering, negative stereotyping and abuse are now out of control – as I know from bitter experience

• 
• • Mehdi Hasan
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 8 July 2012 21.00 BST

'You can now say things about Muslims, in polite society and even among card-carrying liberal lefties, that you cannot say about any other group or minority.' Photograph: Sion Touhig/Corbis

Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist? Extremist, maybe? Welcome to my world. It's pretty depressing. Every morning, I take a deep breath and then go online to discover what new insult or smear has been thrown in my direction. Whether it's tweets, blogposts or comment threads, the abuse is as relentless as it is vicious.
You might think I'd have become used to it by now. Well, I haven't. When I started writing for a living, I never imagined I'd be the victim of such personal, such Islamophobic, attacks, on a near-daily basis. On joining the New Statesman in 2009, I was promptly subjected to an online smear campaign, involving a series of selectively edited videos of speeches I'd delivered in front of groups of Muslim university students several years ago. I was accused of being a "secret" member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and a "dangerous Muslim shithead" in the "same genre" as the Nazis. The post that sticks in my mind is from the blogger who referred to me as a "moderate cockroach" whose Islamic faith was "no different from the Islam of Abu Hamza, Abu Qatada, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Anjem Choudary or any of the 'tiny minority' of Islamic terrorists who believe that Islam must dominate, no matter what the cost".
Three years later, as I leave the New Statesman to join the Huffington Post UK, little seems to have changed. "Huffington Post's new UK political director brings pro-Iran baggage," screamed the headline on the Fox News website back in late May. My "baggage"? I once publicly praised a fatwa from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, forbidding the production of nuclear weapons. Shame on me! Another ultra-conservative US news website, the Washington Free Beacon, referred to me as the "HuffPo's house jihadi".
The mere mention of the words "Islam" or "Muslim" generates astonishing levels of hysteria and hate on the web. As one of only two Muslim columnists in the mainstream media – the other being the Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – I have the dubious distinction of being on the receiving end of much of it. In August 2011, for instance, I wrote a light-hearted column in the Guardian on Ramadan, examining how Muslim athletes cope with fasting while competing. The article provoked an astonishing 957 comments, the vast majority of which were malicious, belligerent or both. As one perplexed commenter observed: "There is much we might criticise Islam for … but to see the amount of hatred being spewed on this thread on an article about something as innocuous as fasting really makes one wonder." Indeed.
And it isn't just pieces about Muslims. A recent interview of mine with the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, elicited the following response: "Get out of my country, goatfucker." How many other political columnists have to deal with such "feedback"? And how many of my fellow pundits in the British media get death threats in the post, warning them that "there will not be 1 live Muslim left in Europe when we have finished"?
From my perspective, the British commentariat can be divided into three groups. The first consists of a handful of journalists who regularly speak out against the rising tide of anti-Muslim bigotry – from the Telegraph's Peter Oborne to a bevy of Guardian columnists, including Jonathan Freedland, Seumas Milne and Gary Younge.
The second consists of those writers, such as the Mail's Melanie Phillips, the Telegraph's Charles Moore and the Spectator's Douglas Murray, who see Islam and Muslims as alien, hostile and threatening. Phillips has referred darkly to a "fifth column in our midst"; Murray has said "conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board".
But it is the third, and perhaps biggest, group that concerns me most: those commentators who boast otherwise impeccable anti-racist credentials yet tend to be silent on the subject of Islamophobia; journalists who cannot bring themselves to recognise, let alone condemn, the growing prevalence of anti-Muslim feeling across Europe – or acknowledge the simple fact that the targeting of a powerless, brown-skinned minority is indeed a form of racism.
I'm a fan of robust debate and I'm not averse to engaging in the odd ad hominem attack myself. This isn't a case of special pleading, on behalf of Britain's Muslims, nor do I think my Islamic beliefs should be exempt from public criticism. But the fact is that you can now say things about Muslims, in polite society and even among card-carrying liberal lefties, that you cannot say about any other group or minority. Am I expected to shrug this off?
The truth is that the fear-mongering and negative stereotyping is out of control. I've lost count of the number of websites that try to "out" every Muslim in public life as an extremist or Islamist of some shape or form. The promotion of Sayeeda Warsi to the Conservative frontbench in 2007 provoked the influential ConservativeHome website to describe her appointment as "the wrong signal at a time when Britain is fighting a global war against Islamic terrorism and extremism". Labour's Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, was accused of holding "extremist" views after he called for a "more independent foreign policy" and was spuriously linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir. In April, Labour peer Lord Ahmed was suspended from the party after he was falsely accused of having put a £10m bounty on Barack Obama's head (the suspension has since been lifted).
If Muslims such as Warsi, Khan, Ahmed and me are all secret extremists, who are the moderates? That, of course, seems to be the implicit, insidious message: there aren't any. But if those of us who try to participate in public life and contribute to political debate are constantly painted with a broad brush of suspicion and distrust, then what hope is there for the thousands of young British Muslims who feel alienated and marginalised from the political process? I used to encourage Muslim students to get involved in the media or in politics, but I now find it much harder to do so. Why would I want anyone else to go through what I've gone through? Believe me, Muslims aren't endowed thicker skins than non-Muslims.
To say that I find the relentlessly hostile coverage of Islam, coupled with the personal abuse that I receive online, depressing is an understatement. There have been times – for instance, when I found my wife curled up on our couch, in tears, after having discovered some of the more monstrous and threatening comments on my New Statesman blog – when I've wondered whether it's all worth it. Perhaps, a voice at the back of my head suggests, I should throw in the towel and go find a less threatening, more civilised line of work. But that's what the trolls want. To silence Muslims; to deny a voice to a voiceless community. I shouldn't have to put up with this abuse. But I will. I have no plans to let the Islamophobes win. So, dare I ask: who's with me?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/08/muslims-public-life-abuse?commentpage=all#start-of-comments

Owen Jones: Islamophobia - for Muslims, read Jews. And be shocked

Imagine our alarm if nearly half the UK population said they believed that 'there are too many Jews'

Friday 13 July 2012 

To be a prominent Muslim means suffering a daily diet of bigotry and even outright hatred. This week, Mehdi Hasan – who, other than my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, is Britain's only prominent Muslim journalist – wrote of how, every day, he is attacked as a "jihadist" and a "terrorist". He has been described as a "dangerous Muslim shithead", a "moderate cockroach", and worse. The message from his critics is clear: Muslims have no legitimate place in public life.

Mehdi Hasan was right to speak out, but it must not be left to Muslims alone to take on this bigotry. A tide of Islamophobia has swept Europe for many years, and – shamefully – all too few have taken a stand. Even many who regard themselves as "progressives" have either remained silent or even indulged anti-Muslim prejudice. It's time for Muslims and non-Muslims alike to join forces against the most widespread – and most acceptable – form of bigotry of our times.
Think I'm exaggerating? Consider that the far-right's main target of choice is no longer Jews or black people: it's Muslims. The BNP portrays itself as a crusade against the "Islamification" of Britain; in the 2010 election, it launched a "Campaign Against Islam". Its leader, Nick Griffin, describes Islam as "wicked" and a "cancer", and has blamed Muslims for problems such as drugs and rape. The English Defence League stages frequent – and often intimidating – street rallies protesting against Muslims.
But anti-Muslim prejudice isn't simply confined to the far-right fringes. I attended a Stockport sixth form with a large Muslim student population. The reality of their lives is all but airbrushed out of existence. When they appear at all, it's generally as fanatics, extremists or a community somehow "harbouring" dangerous extremists. (When do Britain's whites face the absurdity of being called on to crack down on far-right fanatics supposedly in their ranks?) One study took a selection of newspapers in a single week: 91 per cent of reports featuring Muslims were negative.
One of my Muslim fellow students was Dr Leon Moosavi, fast becoming a national authority on Islamophobia. He battles against the widespread denial that anti-Muslim prejudice is a problem. But consider that, in one poll conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 45 per cent of Britons agreed that "there are too many Muslims" in Britain. Imagine if nearly half the population admitted to believing that "there are too many Jews" in Britain: how loud would our alarm be?
Of course, it is not just a British problem: the poison of Islamophobia has infected Europe's political mainstream. According to a Pew Research Center survey, nearly six out of 10 Europeans believe that Muslims were "fanatical", and half believed they were "violent". As here, the European far-right aims fire at Muslims above all other groups. In the Netherlands, an anti-Muslim party led by Geert Wilders is the third largest in parliament. Wilders compares the Koran to Mein Kampf, calls Islam a "Trojan Horse" in Europe and demands that the country's 850,000 Muslims be paid to leave the country. Wilders doesn't languish on the fringes: the current Dutch cabinet depended for two years on his party's support.
Or take sleepy Switzerland, where the Swiss People's Party (SVP) is the biggest party in the country's Federal Assembly. The SVP won a referendum on the banning of minarets, which the party's general secretary described as "symbols of Islamic power". During the vote, Geneva's mosque was repeatedly vandalised. Farhad Afshar, the president of the Coordination of Islamic Organisations, had no doubt what signal was sent by this vote: "that Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community". But it gets even darker than that. In June, the Zurich-based SVP politician Alexander Müller was forced to stand down after tweeting: "Maybe we need another Kristallnacht… this time for mosques." The parallels with anti-Semitism could not be more overt.
In France – where recently 42 per cent polled for Le Monde believed that the presence of Muslims was a "threat" to their national identity – a record number voted for the anti-Muslim National Front in April's presidential elections. Denmark's third largest party is the People's Party, which rails against "Islamisation" and demands the end of all non-Western immigration. The anti-Muslim Vlaams Belang flourishes in Flemish Belgium. But those who take a stand against Islamophobia are often demanded to qualify it with a condemnation of extremism. When is this ever asked of other stands against prejudice? When we condemn anti-Semitic hate, must we criticise repressive Israeli policies in the same breath? It would be absurd – they are completely separate issues, and indeed millions of Jews across the world oppose the actions of Israel's government.
Anti-Muslim hate is a European pandemic. I'm proud to stand with Mehdi Hasan and other Muslims facing Islamophobia. But – I implore, I beg fellow non-Muslims – stand with them too, before this hatred spirals further out of control.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-islamophobia--for-muslims-read-jews-and-be-shocked-7939392.html

how they make it look so tasty...

On a McDonalds photoshoot

 http://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/video/food-13177966/behind-the-scenes-at-a-mcdonald-s-photoshoot-29747557.html

  image over reality?