Ministry of Truth

On Monday, as has been widely reported, a 35 year old woman from North Yorkshire, Sarah Louise Catt, was sentenced to eight years imprisonment after pleading guilty to a, thankfully, extremely rare offence under s58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. 58. Administering drugs or using […]

Most people will be aware of the aphorism that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’, fewer will be aware of the fact that there is quite a solid body of psychological research literature which suggests that there is considerable truth in that statement. In particular, […]

Over on the other side of the big pond, the Sacramento Bee is carrying the following report of a newly published ‘study’ which looks at the ‘relationship’ between female mortality and first pregnancy outcome. SPRINGFIELD, Ill., Sept. 5, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — A new study of the medical records […]

Recently I published a series of five articles that looked in depth at the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) hypothesis and the complex relationship between women’s reproductive history and their short and long term risk of developing breast cancer. Based on the research evidence I covered in those articles, we […]

If you’re guessing that the correct answer to the title question is ‘nothing’ then congratulations, you have the correct answer but please permit me to elaborate a little further. At the beginning of May I wrote about David Stevens, a Leatherhead-based quack who trades under the names Vital […]

Only yesterday I noticed this rather curious report in the Press Gazette… A solicitor failed in an attempt to sue a political blogger for defamation and malicious falsehood when a judge decided that the words of which he complained could not be held to refer to him. The […]

A subject I’ve been meaning to tackle for a while, but never quite got around to, is that of The Great Rape Joke Controversy™, which flared up on Twitter (again!) the other day – and if you missed the action then I’d heartily recommend that you read Ally […]

According to the Guardian, things don’t seem to going too well for Michael Gove’s flagship free schools programme in Suffolk: There are around 10,600 empty school places in Suffolk. Or, to put it another way, if 10 average-sized secondary schools were closed down, there would still be a […]

A couple of days ago I received an email from Carl Gardner, who blogs at Head of Legal, in which he asked whether I had been contacted by Liz Watson and asked to remove from the Ministry all reference to her and to her involvement in the case […]

Since the publication of the Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer’s meta-analysis of Aborton-Breast Cancer (ABC) studies in 2004 – Beral et al. (2004) [1] – two further large prospective studies have been published, neither of which found that induced abortion was associated with an increase […]