News that should make you proud to be British: we’re going to become the first nation to get over our it-ain’t-natural squeamishness and offer the new form of IVF treatment that will allow children to be born with “three parents”. The inexplicably controversial treatment involves using the mitochondrial DNA of a donor, with the usual…
Month: June 2013
One by one, the tennis gods slipped away
From Friday’s Daily Telegraph: Wimbledon can be an odd experience for the newcomer – especially if it’s Black Wednesday They’re calling it Black Wednesday: the day that half of Wimbledon’s stars seemed to fall – to injury and underdogs. I was sitting in Centre Court on Wednesday – in, literally, Row Z – with my…
It’s not the Met Office’s fault if you wasted money on a swimming pool, Boris
It pains me to say this about a colleague, but I think Boris Johnson is playing to the gallery a little. A generation of British homeowners have been lumbered with silly swimming pools, he writes, because the Met Office and the BBC have been telling them that they’re all going to swelter in Mediterranean heat…
Genetically modified foods: saving lives, or lining corporate pockets? (Or both?)
[ooyala id=”lkeTRuYzq-HbOvFul2J1hU6d3f8cMuiT” ] Frankenfood or saviour of the starving? The Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, made a major speech last week, calling on the European Union to drop its barriers preventing genetically modified (GM) organisms being grown and sold in Europe. It could, he said, be the difference between survival and starvation for millions of people…
The sad demise of the Men in Dark Tweed
From Saturday’s Daily Telegraph: Whitehall may have decided that aliens don’t exist – but how can we be so sure? I want to believe. It would be brilliant if the skies above us were filled with Zeta Reticulan lizards and Vulcans and little grey men in flying saucers. I’d like to be able to thumb…
The drug firm pricing racket is the tip of the iceberg of Big Pharma malpractice
[ooyala id=”54MXhuYzoYFJ2_4DHxY98pL_5Sepw9Wm” ] We report this morning on the shocking claim that pharmaceutical companies have been colluding with pharmacies to systematically overcharge the NHS for medicines. The pharma firms appear to have used backhanders to the pharmacists, in order to artificially inflate the costs of as many as 20,000 medicines known as “specials” – drugs…
Sally Morgan isn’t listening to an earpiece. Bravo, Sally. Still telling people you’re talking to the dead, though?
Sally Morgan has never “used a hidden earpiece during her performance in order to receive instructions from her team which she then repeated on stage as if she had received them from the spirit world”. I am entirely happy to make that clear now, right at the beginning of this piece, because she’s just won…
Joffrey Osborne
Sure, sure, Barack Obama claims he got George Osborne confused with the soul singer Jeffrey Osborne. Because, you know, they look so similar and all that, and George is known for his ineffable cool and his smooth, smooth voice. But a few people have suggested that actually there is a closer parallel with Joffrey Baratheon,…
‘Edginess’ is banter, repackaged for hipster idiots
Hey! You know what’d be edgy? A picture, of, like, an underwear-clad girl all covered in blood and bruises and such, but she’s like smiling at the camera and saying sorry? Makes you think, right? Or, right, we could do a thing about DEATH TO FAGS, right, and it’d have all these pics of gay…
Save our Science Museums
I love the Science Museum. If you’re a Londoner you might not know that it’s not just the one thing: it has three other branches, in Manchester, York and Bradford. They’re remarkable places – I have extraordinarily fond memories of going around the Manchester one as a young boy with my grandfather. Now, because of…
Welcome back, Ozzy Osbourne, the tongue-in-cheek Prince of Darkness
Generals gathered in their masses Just like witches at black masses Evil minds that plot destruction Sorcerers of death’s construction In the fields the bodies burning As the war machine keeps turning Death and hatred to mankind Poisoning their brainwashed minds Oh lord yeah! You have to hand it to Ozzy Osbourne and his Black…
Reefer madness? If ‘super skunk’ is causing mental health problems, the perverse drug laws are to blame
Imagine that you’re a smuggler. You’re running a high-risk operation bringing contraband jewellery out of a country which outlaws the export of any precious or semi-precious stones. If you get caught, you face years in jail. Do you smuggle a) quartz or b) diamond? No, it’s not a hard question, is it. If your risks…
Tom Chivers 