A Muslim teaching assistant at a British junior school has been suspended after refusing to remove her veil in class, a newspaper reported on Friday.
Aishah Azmi, 24, was asked to remove her veil, which reveals only her eyes, after pupils struggled to understand English lessons because they could not see her lips move, the Daily Mirror said.
Azmi is a bilingual support worker at Headfield Church of England junior school in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, northern England, where most of the seven-to-11-year-old pupils are of Pakistani or Indian origin.
Her suspension came days after former British foreign secretary and current Cabinet minister Jack Straw provoked controversy by revealing that he asked Muslim women visiting his constituency surgery to remove their veils.
Straw held his first constituency surgery in Blackburn, north-west England, on Friday since his controversial comments and it passed without incident.
A spokesman for the Kirklees Council, the school's local administrative body, confirmed that Azmi's case had gone to an employment tribunal and that she would remain suspended until it had reached a verdict.
Many children at the school are still learning to speak English and have Panjabi, Gujarati and Urdu as their first languages, according to a report by Ofsted, Britain's education regulator, in February.
The Daily Mirror said that Azmi was told she could wear the veil in the school's corridors and staff room but had been asked to remove it while teaching to facilitate better face-to-face communication with students.
The area's lawmaker, Labour's Shahid Malik, a Muslim himself, said he thought that the request to remove the veil was "utterly reasonable."
"All right-minded people, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike, will agree that in asking a classroom assistant not to wear a veil whilst in contact with children because it hinders their learning is perfectly acceptable and just common sense," he said.
A Chinese aircraft carrier group entered Japan’s economic waters over the weekend, before exiting to conduct drills involving fighter jets, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said yesterday. The Liaoning aircraft carrier, two missile destroyers and one fast combat supply ship sailed about 300km southwest of Japan’s easternmost island of Minamitori on Saturday, a ministry statement said. It was the first time a Chinese aircraft carrier had entered that part of Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), a ministry spokesman said. “We think the Chinese military is trying to improve its operational capability and ability to conduct operations in distant areas,” the spokesman said. China’s growing
BUILDUP: US General Dan Caine said Chinese military maneuvers are not routine exercises, but instead are ‘rehearsals for a forced unification’ with Taiwan China poses an increasingly aggressive threat to the US and deterring Beijing is the Pentagon’s top regional priority amid its rapid military buildup and invasion drills near Taiwan, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday. “Our pacing threat is communist China,” Hegseth told the US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense during an oversight hearing with US General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Beijing is preparing for war in the Indo-Pacific as part of its broader strategy to dominate that region and then the world,” Hegseth said, adding that if it succeeds, it could derail
COMPLIANCE: The SEF has helped more than 3,900 Chinese verify documents, indicating that most of those affected are willing to cooperate, the MAC said More than 3,100 spouses from China have submitted proof of renunciation of their Chinese household registration, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday. The National Immigration Agency has since April issued notices to spouses to submit proof that they had renounced their Chinese household registration on or before June 30 or their Taiwanese household registration would be revoked. People having difficulties obtaining such a document can request an extension of the deadline or submit a written affidavit in lieu of it. The council said it would hold a briefing at 2:30pm on Friday at the immigration agency’s Taichung office in cooperation with the
CHIP WAR: The new restrictions are expected to cut off China’s access to Taiwan’s technologies, materials and equipment essential to building AI semiconductors Taiwan has blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), dealing another major blow to the two companies spearheading China’s efforts to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ International Trade Administration has included Huawei, SMIC and several of their subsidiaries in an update of its so-called strategic high-tech commodities entity list, the latest version on its Web site showed on Saturday. It did not publicly announce the change. Other entities on the list include organizations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as companies in China, Iran and elsewhere. Local companies need
RSS