The ruling by Judge Peter Murphy which allowed a Muslim woman to wear her full-face veil in court except when giving evidence is sensible.

It is a compromise between an individual’s religious belief and a social necessity.

There are times when facial expressions are an essential part of communication or need scrutiny. Those occasions are not many but they do exist. Truth telling is something that human beings assess by body language, facial expressions in particular, and that is surely useful in a court room.

[The furore over Falkirk and Labour’s relationship with the unions] conveniently masks a potential scandal ... the government’s announcement on political lobbying, soiled by its unexpected inclusion of an attack on trade union support for the Labour Party.

Apparently any money spent by an affiliated union campaigning at an election is to be treated not only as a “third party expenditure” as at present, but also as a Labour Party expenditure for the purposes of electoral law. As such, it will count towards the Party’s electoral spending limit.

On Friday 13 September, around 30 workers and community activists occupied Wallsend Memorial Hall in North Tyneside.

Though universities like UCL [University College London] have an annoying habit of bringing up their place in university rankings, something tells me they won’t be mentioning one particular accolade very often.

New halls built for UCL students have just been awarded the Carbuncle Cup, an award given by Building Design magazine to the worst new building. Just to repeat, that’s not “worst new university halls” or even, “worst new block of flats”, but Worst New Building.

Earlier this month the UN Special Rapporteur on Housing, Raquel Rolnick, reported on UK housing conditions (including the implications of the Bedroom Tax).

On 16 October, Australian trade union and community activist Bob Carnegie is due to appear in court again.

Construction company Abigroup, part of the Lend Lease empire, is suing him and two unions, the CFMEU and the ETU, for a total of $15 million damages over the strike in August-October 2012 at the Queensland Children’s Hospital (QCH) construction site.

In the last few months there have been many protests in Israel over government plans to remove tens of thousands of Israeli Bedouins from their ancestral villages and land.

Named after prime ministerial advisor Ehud Prawer, the “Prawer Plan” is the Israeli government’s attempt to “resolve” the disputed ownership of land currently inhabited by Bedouin Arabs, primarily in the Negev desert.

In a message to a Paris rally last November, Albert Camus said:

"I admit that I was tempted in recent years to despair of the fate of freedom ... I feared that it was really dead, and that was why it sometimes seemed to me that all things were being covered over by the dishonor of our time. But the young people of Hungary, of Spain, of France, of all countries, proved to us that this is not so and that nothing has destroyed or ever will destroy that pure and violent force that impels men and nations to demand the honor of living with integrity."

Polemic following the article Rivers of rubbish and its polemic against denunciations of Socialist Organiser (a forerunner of AWL) in the paper Workers' Press.

Unison is balloting its members in Higher Education for strikes to win pay increases. The union’s Higher Education Service Group Executive is recommending that members vote yes for strikes after HE employers refused to increase the 1% offer. The ballot closes on 8 October.

The University and College Union, which represents academic staff in the HE sector, concluded a consultative ballot on the deal on 4 September, but is yet to announce the result. The union recommended that members reject the deal and vote for strikes.