On Twitter, Blue Wode has picked up on a rather bizarre story that’s currently unfolding in South Africa… Johannesburg – A woman, whose requested to address the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court on the “mental state” of murder accused athlete Oscar Pistorius, has approached the Constitutional Court, the Saturday Star […]

I know that American professional wrestling, or sports entertainment as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) prefer to call these days, is not everyone’s cup of tea but bear with me on this post,  the video that you’ll see at the end is well worth watching. There is a bit […]

The jury that sat in trial on Chris Huhne’s ex-wife, Vicky Pryce, has been widely derided in the press (and on Twitter, naturally) for putting this question to the trial judge: QUESTION 5 Can a juror come to a verdict based on a reason that was not presented […]

The Guardian’s CiF Belief section is currently running a head-to-head debate article which pits Austen Ivereigh, co-ordinator of Catholic astroturfing operation ‘Catholic Voices’, against Tina Beattie, a professor of Catholic Studies* at the University of Roehampton. * Quite why anyone would feel the need to study Catholics, least […]

To be brutally honest, Fifty Shades of Grey is one of those books that ranked pretty high on my personal list of books to avoided like the plague even before I discovered that it had started life as a bit of dodgy BSDM fan-fiction using characters from the […]

I don’t know how much national press coverage this story will get but today’s Birmingham Mail is reporting another sorry case of a Police officer falling down on the job: A “rogue” policeman has quit the West Midlands force after admitting retracting a domestic violence victim’s statement without […]

It feels a little odd to be writing about a segment on ITV’s This Morning – not a programme I’d usually look in on – but as the segment pitted Kate Smurthwaite against Nadine Dorries in a ‘debate’ on the upper limit for elective abortion I felt that, […]

Desperation has clearly set in at the offices of the Amalgamated Union of Bigots, Godbotherers and Allied Dinosaurs, AKA the Coalition for Marriage, which has commissioned no less than seven separate opinion polls for publication this week in the hope of wrapping the issue of same-sex marriage in […]

As independent blogs go Liberal Conspiracy is, for the UK, a pretty sizeable operation and, I assume, quite expensive to run, so one can hardly be surprised to see it running a bit of advertising in an effort generate a bit of revenue to pay the hosting bills. […]

I am unashamedly a fan of the work of fact checking organisations and websites, not least amongst which is the excellent Full Fact. However, as a stats hound myself, I am also very much aware of the limitations and occasional pitfalls of the standard fact check model used […]