My colleague Cristina Odone writes today about the crisis in adoption rates. She is right, I think, to say there is a need for an overhaul of the system, and that it is too difficult at the moment for prospective parents to adopt. It’s easy to decry “red tape” and “bureaucracy”, and of course if…
Month: April 2011
Game of Thrones on Sky Atlantic: blood, boobs, horror – and grown-up fantasy
I don’t know if any of you are fans of The Lord of the Rings. I am, sort of. I say sort of, because – brilliant though the books, and the Peter Jackson movie adaptations, undoubtedly are – JRR Tolkien never really worked out how people behave, or how they talk to each other. Gollum…
Fifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin went into space. What’s next?
Fifty years ago today, mankind took its first step off the planet. Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan on April 12, 1961. He launched at 06:07GMT, was in orbit by 06:17 and had circumnavigated the globe by 07:55. At five past eight in the morning…
Should gay men be allowed to donate blood?
The most read article on our health pages for the last couple of days has been the following: “Homosexual men allowed to give blood but sex banned for decade”. As you can probably work out from the headline, for the first time in the UK, men who have had sex with other men are expected…
Conservatives are all cowards. Science says so (or, more accurately, it doesn’t)
We report today that “people who vote Tory are naturally more anxious than those with more liberal views”. Yes, you heard it here first: conservatives are scaredy-cat cowards living in constant, gibbering fear of the modern world. Yeah. Not like us ultra-macho fearless liberals. I will totally fight you all. Right now. Now, before I…
Climate change: will Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature change Watts Up With That’s mind?
[A rare treat: Anthony Watts has responded to this post, in a wonderfully polite and actually very complimentary post on Watts Up With That. My thanks to him. A grown-up debate on climate change – this is how it should work.] After years of arguments, it looked, recently, as though we might be approaching a…
Nadine Dorries, Right to Know and abortion: responding to the respons
Note: I’ve emailed Professor David Fergusson of Otaga University, whose study is at the centre of a lot of the controversy here, to clarify for me what his study said. I’ve included his response at the bottom.] This is indeed an honour. Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, has responded to my previous post. (Admittedly, she…
Tom Chivers 