Ministry of Truth

From the file marked ‘Misleading Headlines’ the Press Association (as churned by MSN UK news) reports: 400 abortions ‘without sign-offs’ More than 400 abortions were carried out last year without the right information being submitted to the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), official figures have shown. Doctors also failed […]

In part 3 I looked in detail at Brind et al. (1996) [1], the key meta-analysis on which the Abortion-Breast Cancer Hypothesis is founded and foudn that Brind’s claim to have demonstrated a causal link between abortion and breast cancer is, to say the least, extremely questionable. This […]

To quickly recap: In part one, I looked at the provenance of the Abortion-Breast Cancer (ABC) hypothesis, noting that it is not supported by any of the major cancer research/prevention organisations in either the US or UK, including the US National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society and Cancer […]

In part 1 we looked at the provenance of the Abortion-Breast Cancer (ABC) hypothesis and demonstrated, pretty conclusively, that its main proponents are religious zealots who are motivated to promote this hypothesis by their religious/moral objections to induced abortion. As we move on to look at the science […]

In everything I’ve written on the subject of abortion over the las four to five years perhaps the only issue I’ve not addressed in detail is the Abortion-Breast Cancer (ABC) hypothesis for the simple reason that I had thought it to have been so comprehensively discredited that it […]

Apropos of my last post on the subject of GCSE examinations, Caroline Crampton offers a few ‘thoughts’ (a very loose description) on the same subject at the New Statesman: Will Gove’s new O-Levels teach you anything useful? What exactly might Gove’s plans to replace GCSEs (which he feels […]

News that Michael Gove reportedly intends to replace the current GCSE system with ‘tougher’ O-level style exams in a system in which ‘less academic’ students would sit a “different ‘more straightforward’ exam, like the old CSE” has rapidly spawned a debate on ‘segregation’ which looks, to me, like […]

Update #2 – 15:20pm, 8 June 2012 The Rationalist Association have now updated their petition to reflect the information in this post and the discussion we had this morning, so the comments below are now moot other than serving as a record of the RA’s willingness to respond […]

India prides itself on being the world’s largest secular democracy but when you scratch the surface of that claim just a little that claim starts to look rather shaky as Indian skeptic and rationalist Sanal Edamarku recently discovered after he investigated a ‘weeping statue’ at the Catholic Basillica […]

According to Andrew Lansley, speaking at an NHS Clinical Commissioners conference in April, “age is the principal determinant of health need” from which it follows, logically, that the NHS should devote a greater proportion of its resources towards providing health care services is those areas of the country […]