Paddy Doyle’s timeline of Irish Industrial Schools and failed attempts to reform them.… Read the rest

On NPR’s Science Friday in 1996, the rising popularity of pseudoscience and the importance of critical thinking.… Read the rest

We have needed Sagan ever since Copernicus removed us from the center of the universe.… Read the rest

Relativity has been attacked in the name of US pragmatism, German idealism, English Hegelianism, French Bergsonianism (by fellow Jew Henri Bergson!), Soviet “diamat” (dialectical materialism) and Nazi “Deutsche Physik”… Read the rest

Debate human nature.… Read the rest

Books by a superb (albeit incorrigibly centrist) reporter and a radical social critic.… Read the rest

Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress; fifteen died.… Read the rest

She was regularly beaten, left to sleep in her own urine, had her teeth knocked out, was hospitalised after a beating when she tried to break out of the orphanage.… Read the rest

Human rights group also wants web log writers to highlight the plight of fellow bloggers jailed for what they wrote in their online journals.… Read the rest

Very nasty stuff… Read the rest

She houses, feeds, clothes and pays for the schooling of orphans in Uganda.… Read the rest

Dr Mohini Giri works to rescue Indian widows from living death.… Read the rest

God didn’t do it, he wasn’t there at the time, and besides he’s sorry.… Read the rest

Article 37 of Maryland’s constitution provides that “no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God”… Read the rest

She rose to prominence fighting for those most easily marginalised in Africa – poor women. … Read the rest

Chris Bertram asks why the British left reacted the way it did.… Read the rest

God is silent and inert, the evidence is inadequate, and the universe is not the one predicted.… Read the rest

The strongly patriarchal nature of South Asian societies ensures even worse treatment for lesbians than for gay men.… Read the rest

Being gay in Bangladesh isn’t easy.… Read the rest