The primary site for this blog mirror is HERE. Dissecting Leftism is HERE (and mirrored here). The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here. Other mirror sites: Greenie Watch, Political Correctness Watch, Education Watch, Immigration Watch, Food & Health Skeptic, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine, Dissecting Leftism, Recipes, Tongue Tied and Australian Politics. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************



30 November, 2009

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Britain's hospitals may be bad but the regulators are worse

Another week, another hospital scandal. The story is beginning to be all too familiar: dozens of patients dying needlessly, in filthy conditions that would shame a Third World country.

It emerged on Thursday that inspectors making unannounced checks in October on Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust discovered a collection of horrors: blood spattered on floors and curtains, mattresses soaked with foul-smelling stains, contaminated equipment, a high rate of pressure sores among the elderly, long waiting times in the accident and emergency department and, worst of all, poor nursing care, with old people deprived of food, attention and dignity. As a result, about 70 people in the care of the Basildon and Thurrock trust may have died needlessly: its mortality rate is a third higher than the national average.

Ministers and media expressed shock and horror, but within hours there was news of another scandal of just the same sort. On Friday the regulator Monitor, which supervises NHS foundation trust hospitals, announced it had sacked the chairman of the Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust: Colchester also has higher than average mortality rates. Monitor charges the trust with poor leadership, long waiting times, poor infection screening, poor children’s services and worsening patient satisfaction. It is not often that someone gets sacked these days — something must be really bad.

That makes three hospital horror stories this year, counting the reports in March about conditions at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust; 400 people died there needlessly. Monitor has concerns about a further eight trusts.

What on earth is going on? It is bad enough that we have some — perhaps many — dreadful hospitals, even though the NHS budget has tripled in the past decade. What is even worse is that it seems difficult to have any confidence in the many people and organisations responsible for overseeing hospitals and anticipating these problems — not just bad hospitals but bad supervision. Why has it taken so long for these bad practices and poor outcomes to be noticed? The mortality figures have been available for more than 10 years.

In the case of Basildon and Thurrock, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the new independent regulator for all health and social care in England, was the body that inspected the trust and published the dreadful findings. Yet last month it posted on its website a glowing report on the trust, giving it 13 out of 14 for cleanliness and 5 out of 5 for keeping the public healthy. This report, astonishingly, is still there.

The CQC knew this information was wrong; it must have realised the report would be misleading to the public who went to the site to check hospitals’ performance. Yet it has left the report on its site. One can only wonder about the information on other hospitals. Why should one trust any of it?

Baroness Young, the chairwoman of the CQC, found herself in an impossible position last week, confronted with this inconsistency. Wriggle as she would under the probing of the Today programme, she could do no better than to say her organisation is only eight months old and the report on the website was done months ago under the previous regime — the Healthcare Commission — and things are going to be much better now. She failed to deal with the problem of public trust.

She also failed to inspire confidence in her strange attack on the methodology of hospital mortality figures provided by Dr Foster Intelligence, an organisation the public might actually be able to trust. It is a partnership between the NHS and the Dr Foster unit at Imperial College; it provides monthly and carefully adjusted mortality figures across the NHS, which are known for their reliability and which have directly prompted all the recent investigations into problem hospitals. Dr Foster now makes a point of writing to all NHS hospital chief executives to warn them when their mortality rates begin to rise.

I wonder what Baroness Young thinks is wrong with the figures or their methodology. The rest of the CQC seems to think they are all right and a useful tool for looking at hospital performance. In fact, everyone seems to accept the Dr Foster figures apart from a few ministers. On Saturday morning, for instance, Andy Burnham, the health secretary, called for an investigation to uncover high death rates across the NHS.

But that information exists already, in neat monthly packages from Dr Foster Intelligence; there can be no point in calling for it, other than wearisome politics.

Altogether this government’s NHS policies bring to mind an interfering child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Since 1997 we have had six secretaries of state for health. That means an average of two years in post. It is impossible for anyone to understand the essentials of our byzantine health service in such short fits of attention.

As for the regulators, including the one Baroness Young seems to think was not up to snuff, we have had at least three upheavals of regulations under Labour — the Commission for Health Improvement, then the Healthcare Commission and now the CQC. Such constant change must be at odds with good management.

It is hardly surprising that the public has become so suspicious; there may not be many data about the death of trust in this country, but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Who monitors the monitors? Not only hospital regulation is at issue.

All around us this question keeps emerging.

To the weary citizen, the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war looks just another attempt to avoid any awkward truths. No one is to be on trial; no one is to be blamed. No one has to appear, either, and Macavity Brown, to his shame, won’t be anywhere to be seen. Who is there to insist on what’s right?

The Ofsted report last week was deeply depressing for its cautiously expressed findings — failing schools, illiterate children and poor teaching. What’s worse is that Ofsted and its predecessors have been inspecting and reporting fairly cheerfully for decades, while standards have fallen lower and lower. The Walker inquiry into banking is yet another affront to an angry public. Who is there to insist on public probity? That is the question, sadly. Who will guard the guards themselves?

SOURCE



The most dangerous British hospitals

Twelve NHS hospital trusts have been identified as “significantly underperforming” on a range of safety measures according to new research which has ranked every general hospital in England.

The low performance conclusions came despite overall patient care at eight of these trusts rated as good or excellent last month by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the health service regulator.

The critical research conducted by Dr Foster, a consultancy that collates independent league tables on NHS trusts, also identified 27 trusts with unusually high death rates involving the deaths of 5,000 more patients in the past year than had been expected. The new data are contained in The Dr Foster Hospital Guide 2009 which contains a league table of NHS trusts across England with their performances rated on patient safety.

Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust and Lewisham Hospital NHS Trust in south London are identified as the poorest overall performers. Basildon and Thurrock, Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Tameside Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in Greater Manchester are also named by Dr Foster as having the highest mortality rates.

The report includes incidents of 209 foreign objects such as drill bits left inside patients after surgery; 82 incidents where the wrong part of the body was operated on; and 848 patients under the age of 65 admitted with low-risk conditions who subsequently died.

Barbara Young, who chairs the CQC, last night assured Andy Burnham, the health secretary, there was no evidence that direct intervention was needed in other hospital trusts, apart from Basildon, despite the Dr Foster data.

The NHS boss in charge of Basildon and Thurrock had received an 11% pay rise in the past year. Alan Whittle, chief executive of the trust, who was paid £150,000 during 2008-9, also saw the value of his pension pot increase by nearly £500,000 to £1.5m over the same period.

Details of Whittle’s pay emerged after a CQC report found that poor nursing, dirty wards and a lack of leadership had contributed to an estimated 400 avoidable deaths at the Basildon hospital last year.

A CQC spot check last month had uncovered soiled mattresses, poor clinical practices, mould growing in suction machines and out-of-date medical equipment.

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, a pressure group, criticised a culture of “rewards for failure” within the National Health Service. “Surgeons and doctors who fail patients can be struck off and the same should be true of NHS executives,” she said.

Michael Large, the trust’s chairman, said Whittle’s 11% pay rise reflected the hospital’s higher turnover and greater responsibilities for executives.

Yesterday it emerged that Whittle is having a relationship with Karen Bates, a hospital safety manager who also serves on the hospital’s board of governors.

SOURCE



British woman dies after cancer screening blunder at NHS hospital

And the blunder was covered up

One woman has died and hundreds of other cancer patients put at risk after a crucial machine used to test for the best way to treat the killer disease developed a fault that was not repaired for at least a month. The NHS hospital at the centre of the blunder failed to tell patients their results may have been wrong due to the broken equipment. It also did not report the incident to the medical authorities – an apparent breach of Department of Health rules designed to protect patients and alert doctors to problems.

Last month, mum Tracey Kindley, 43, died of breast cancer after learning her treatment had been based on inaccurate test results. She was being treated at a private hospital in North London after she discovered a suspicious lump in March 2005.

Her doctors performed a biopsy and sent it to a local NHS Trust’s pathology department, which confirmed her cancer. But one of the machines used at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital, in Welwyn Garden City, crucial in assisting her doctors in deciding the best treatment for the cancer, was not working correctly. The machine – used to test hormone levels – gave a ‘false negative reading’ for oestrogen, meaning she was not prescribed certain life-saving drugs because it was thought they would have no effect on her cancer.

Her doctors spotted the error only when she failed to respond to treatment and the cancer spread. The doctors ordered new laboratory tests on the original biopsy and these results showed very high oestrogen levels in the cancer cells, alerting them to a major error. Health service managers at the Queen Elizabeth II ordered checks and discovered the machine had developed a fault around the time of the tests on Mrs Kindley.

A service report on the equipment shows a ‘critical repair’ was carried out on May 6, 2005. The managers claim the machine was ‘fixed within days’ of the problem being identified, but crucially Mrs Kindley’s tests were carried out on April 8 – almost a month before the fault was spotted. The East and North Herts NHS Trust, which oversees the hospital, re-examined the results of other patients whose samples were tested on days either side of Mrs Kindley’s.

However, an internal investigation concluded the incident was a ‘one-off’ and that despite testing hundreds of patients during the period, no other patients could have been affected. The conclusion meant patients tested when the machine is known to have been malfunctioning – a period of around four weeks – were never alerted that they, too, may have been given the wrong results.

In the weeks before her death, Mrs Kindley began a legal action against the hospital. Her lawyer Hugh Johnson, of Stewarts Law, believes that had she been given the right treatment, she would have had a 70 per cent chance of making a full recovery.

In his letter to the Trust, Dr Nihal Shah, Mrs Kindley’s consultant clinical oncologist, wrote that she ‘had concerns that a similar scenario does not arise for other patients’.

Mrs Kindley died on October 28. Yesterday, her husband said he blamed the test errors for his wife’s death. ‘I believe they robbed me of my wife. The right results would have opened up other forms of treatment and I believe she would be with me and her son Max now.’

Last night, the Trust acknowledged the tests carried out had given a ‘partial false negative result’ and it has apologised that this should have happened. It admitted that the problem had not been reported to the Medicines and Healthcare product Regulatory Agency. ‘That decision is now being reviewed.’

SOURCE



British vetting stops pupils caring for elderly

The tradition of pupils visiting lonely pensioners for a chat or to help with housework is under threat because schools fear that both the teenagers and the OAPs will have to be officially vetted to check they are not potential abusers. Several independent schools have abandoned the visits, which have become the latest example of interaction between children and adults falling victim to the government’s strict vetting regime.

Staff believe the prospect of someone in their eighties or nineties undergoing a criminal check before pupils are allowed into their homes would be bureaucratic and degrading. Under the vetting and barring scheme, people working with children or vulnerable adults — including the elderly in some cases — will have to start registering with the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) from November next year.

Some organisations have started implementing policies to reflect ISA requirements and some schools have dropped home visits following seminars by ISA officials. A Home Office spokeswoman said she “could not believe” schools had been given the advice and blamed them for getting “completely and utterly the wrong end of the stick”. She said neither the old people nor the pupils would have to be vetted as the visits did not involve formal caring.

Some, however, have been advised teenagers making visits should be checked as elderly people were vulnerable. Others were told the elderly would need to be screened, while in some cases, staff were told both should be vetted. The advice is the latest example of apparent over-zealous application of the scheme. Other results that appear to defy common sense include:

• A visiting hockey team planning to play at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne had to cancel because players were due to stay with parents who had not been vetted.

• The Loft theatre company in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, has banned appearances by children under 18 and is considering closing its youth theatre because of the need to vet adult actors and staff.

• Watford council has banned unvetted parents from two playgrounds as other people’s children are present.

• Exchange visits by children from abroad are being scrapped around the country because parents object to being vetted.

Sir Roger Singleton, the ISA chairman, insisted the scheme was proportionate. He said some people, such as piano tuners or electricians, might choose vetting even if they did not have to for “commercial advantage”. The ISA has a budget of £40m and a staff of 220. Professionals will pay £64 to register; volunteers will not be charged.

Wellington College, Berkshire, is reviewing all its home visits to the elderly, while King’s College school, an independent school in London, said it would avoid home visits.

Mark Lewis, in charge of community work at Millfield school, Somerset, said it had dropped home visits after being advised the pensioners would have to be vetted. “The idea of going round for a friendly chat, running off to get the newspaper or befriending them in that way is finished,” he said. “We now only visit nursing homes.”

John Claughton, chief master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham, said the regulations were heading towards “madness”. He added: “I went to a governors’ meeting at a school where the head was constructing a policy to ensure there were no unaddressed child protection issues in pupils showing prospective parents round at open morning. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Margot James, a Tory parliamentary candidate, who visited an elderly lady when she was a Millfield pupil, deplored the system. She added: “I had to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau when I wanted to give work experience to a 14-year-old this year. I was told the work would have to be outside my home. My office is in my home, so I ignored them.” Her party’s family spokeswoman, Maria Miller, added: “It is disgraceful the government has allowed the new system to become a deterrent for volunteers. It is yet another way this government is undermining trust in society.”

Helen Wright, headmistress of St Mary’s Calne, Wiltshire, said 18-year-old pupils were checked before they could help at residential homes. “It is ridiculous. What a waste of time and money,” she said.

SOURCE



British child protection watchdog destroyed files that showed their negligence

AN insider has accused Ofsted, the children’s inspectorate, of destroying “smoking gun” documents that could expose an attempted cover-up in the Baby P childcare scandal. The Ofsted whistleblower alleges the watchdog deleted draft reports from its computers that gave a highly favourable verdict on Haringey, the London council whose failings contributed to Baby P’s death. The drafts were about to be finalised and released when the tragedy became public. The assessment was then hurriedly scrapped and rewritten to condemn Haringey as inadequate.

The Ofsted documents are being demanded by lawyers for Sharon Shoesmith, the former director of Haringey children’s services. Her dismissal was ordered by Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, over the council’s failure to protect Baby P. Critics believe Shoesmith may be able to pick up hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation from the taxpayer because of the behaviour of Balls and Ofsted. Shoesmith’s legal team, pursuing her claim for wrongful dismissal, argue that the final report — along with another whose drafts Ofsted also tried to suppress — was toughened up only after excessive pressure from Balls on Christine Gilbert, Ofsted’s chief inspector.

Tim Loughton, the Tory children’s spokesman, said: “This all seriously calls into question the integrity of the way Ofsted has been operating. “There are indications of a cover-up and, given the failings of all parties in this case, it is essential we have transparency. In particular, Ed Balls needs to explain exactly what discussions he had with Ofsted behind the scenes.”

The whistleblower has come forward because of concerns that the inspectorate will fail to disclose the evidence in court, where they could constitute a “smoking gun” vital for Shoesmith’s legal team. The insider, who is preparing to disclose the full evidence in public, said the papers had been “deleted from the Haringey shared folder on the Ofsted system and the High Court should have access [to them]”, adding that the deletion of the documents was an attempt to remove the “clear audit trail of all assessments relating to Haringey council”.

The new claims will increase pressure on Gilbert, wife of Tony McNulty, the Labour MP who resigned as a minister in the summer amid controversy over his expenses claims. Gilbert faces questioning by the Commons children’s select committee over her conduct.

Baby P, Peter Connelly, died on August 3, 2007, aged 17 months. He endured months of torture, suffering some 50 injuries, despite being seen by council and NHS staff about 60 times. His mother, Tracey Connelly, her boyfriend Steven Barker and her lodger Jason Owen were jailed for causing or allowing the death.

While Haringey was failing to spot what was going on in Baby P’s home, Ofsted was giving the council a clean bill of health. In 2006 a review by Ofsted and other watchdogs praised Shoesmith’s “strong and dynamic leadership”. In November 2007, just three months after Baby P’s death, its annual performance assessment (APA) rated Haringey’s management of its children’s services as good.

The documents leaked by the whistleblower, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Times despite the alleged destruction of many of the originals, include draft reports, evidence notebooks and minutes of meetings. They show that in November 2008, Ofsted was within days of releasing yet another favourable assessment of Haringey. Then the convictions took place, the Baby P case became public, Balls ordered an emergency inquiry and the draft APA was scrapped. The final 2008 APA, released last December, gave Haringey the lowest rating in four out of seven categories: “In staying safe [the category for safeguarding children], outcomes are poor”, adding that as a whole its services were “inconsistent ... and ... inadequate overall”.

The whistleblower’s leaked draft, approved by a key Ofsted committee known as a regional consistency panel just days before Baby P’s death became national news, had given far more favourable judgments — a grade 3 “good” rating in both safety and overall effectiveness.

Ofsted said this weekend: “We have made no secret of the fact we scrapped the draft and started again. It was right to do so. The data and evidence that back up our APA findings have been retained. The material has no relevance in the court action, to suggest otherwise is a red herring.”

Beachcroft, Shoesmith’s solicitors, said: “We did request copies of the APA reports but never received them. We were told they were not relevant. That is not our view ... we would be very interested if they are still around.”

The documents are the second set of draft reports Ofsted has tried to keep secret. It was criticised by Mr Justice Foskett for withholding drafts of the emergency inspection report ordered by Balls. The Treasury solicitor has now asked Foskett to hold back their release to The Sunday Times and other media.

SOURCE



Climate change data dumped

Leaky Jonathan does a straight report for once (below). Is his faith wavering? He does not however go as far as puncturing the excuse given by the CRU below: That the dumped data was on obsolete media. Transferring it to modern magnetic media would have cost virtually nothing in terms of both space and money

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals - stored on paper and magnetic tape - were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data. In a statement on its website, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data."

The CRU is the world's leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, `Trust us'. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life's work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years. He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is "unequivocally" linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

SOURCE



The great climate change science scandal

The report below appeared in "The Times" of London, which means that the news concerned has now gone mainstream and has become general public knowledge. And it is again an objective article from the keyboard of Leaky Jonathan! Quite a change! He can obviously tell which way the wind is blowing

The storm began with just four cryptic words. "A miracle has happened," announced a contributor to Climate Audit, a website devoted to criticising the science of climate change. "RC" said nothing more - but included a web link that took anyone who clicked on it to another site, Real Climate. There, on the morning of November 17, they found a treasure trove: a thousand or so emails sent or received by Professor Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Jones is a key player in the science of climate change. His department's databases on global temperature changes and its measurements have been crucial in building the case for global warming.

What those emails suggested, however, was that Jones and some colleagues may have become so convinced of their case that they crossed the line from objective research into active campaigning. In one, Jones boasted of using statistical "tricks" to obliterate apparent declines in global temperature. In another he advocated deleting data rather than handing them to climate sceptics. And in a third he proposed organised boycotts of journals that had the temerity to publish papers that undermined the message.

It was a powerful and controversial mix - far too powerful for some. Real Climate is a website designed for scientists who share Jones's belief in man-made climate change. Within hours the file had been stripped from the site. Several hours later, however, it reappeared - this time on an obscure Russian server. Soon it had been copied to a host of other servers, first in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and then Europe and America. What's more, the anonymous poster was determined not to be stymied again. He or she posted comments on climate-sceptic blogs, detailing a dozen of the best emails and offering web links to the rest. Jones's statistical tricks were now public property.

Steve McIntyre, a prominent climate sceptic, was amazed. "Words failed me," he said. Another, Patrick Michaels, declared: "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud."

Inevitably, the affair became nicknamed Climategate. For the scientists, campaigners and politicians trying to rouse the world to action on climate change the revelations could hardly have come at a worse time. Next month global leaders will assemble in Copenhagen to seek limits on carbon emissions. The last thing they need is renewed doubts about the validity of the science.

The scandal has also had a huge personal and professional impact on the scientists. "These have been the worst few days of my professional life," said Jones. He had to call on the police for protection after receiving anonymous phone calls and personal threats.

Why should a few emails sent to and from a single research scientist at a middle-ranking university have so much impact? And most importantly, what does it tell us about the quality of the research underlying the science of climate change?

THE hacking scandal is not an isolated event. Instead it is the latest round of a long-running battle over climate science that goes back to 1990. That was when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the group of scientists that advises governments worldwide - published its first set of reports warning that the Earth faced deadly danger from climate change. A centrepiece of that report was a set of data showing how the temperature of the northern hemisphere was rising rapidly.

The problem was that the same figures showed that it had all happened before. The so-called medieval warm period of about 1,000 years ago saw Britain covered in vineyards and Viking farmers tending cows in Greenland. For any good scientist this raised a big question: was the recent warming linked to humans burning fossil fuels or was it part of a natural cycle?

The researchers set to work and in 1999 a group led by Professor Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, came up with new numbers showing that the medieval warm period was not so important after all. Some bits of the Atlantic may have been warm for a while, but the records suggested that the Pacific had been rather chilly over the same period - so on average there was little change. Plotted out, Mann's data turned into the famous "hockey stick" graph. It showed northern hemisphere temperatures as staying flat for hundreds of years and then rising steeply from 1900 until now. The implication was that this rise would continue, with potentially deadly consequences for humanity.

That vision of continents being hit by droughts and floods while the Arctic melts away has turned a scientific debate into a highly emotional and political one. The language used by "warmists" and sceptics alike has become increasingly polarised. George Monbiot, widely respected as a writer on green issues, has branded doubters "climate deniers", a phrase uncomfortably close to holocaust denial. Sceptics, particularly in America, have suggested that scientists who believe in climate change are part of a global left-wing conspiracy to divert billions of dollars into green technology.

A more cogent criticism is that there has been a reluctance to acknowledge dissent on the question of climate science. Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned green campaigner, has described the climate debate as "settled". Yet the science, say critics, has not been tested to the limit. This is why the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia is so significant.

Its researchers have built up records of how temperatures have changed over thousands of years. Perhaps the most important is the land and sea temperature record for the world since the mid-19th century. This is the database that shows the "unequivocal" rise of 0.8C over the last 157 years on which Mann's hockey stick and much else in climate science depend.

Some critics believe that the unit's findings need to be treated with more caution, because all the published data have been "corrected" - meaning they have been altered to compensate for possible anomalies in the way they were taken. Such changes are normal; what's controversial is how they are done. This is compounded by the unwillingness of the unit to release the original raw data.

David Holland, an engineer from Northampton, is one of a number of sceptics who believe the unit has got this process wrong. When he submitted a request for the figures under freedom of information laws he was refused because it was "not in the public interest". Others who made similar requests were turned down because they were not academics, among them McIntyre, a Canadian who runs the Climate Audit website.

A genuine academic, Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, also tried. He said: "I was rejected for an entirely different reason. The [unit] told me they had obtained the data under confidentiality agreements and so could not supply them. This was odd because they had already supplied some of them to other academics, but only those who support the idea of climate change."

It was against this background that the emails were leaked last week, reinforcing suspicions that scientific objectivity has been sacrificed. There is unease even among researchers who strongly support the idea that humans are changing the climate. Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said: "Over the last decade there has been a very political battle between the climate sceptics and activist scientists. "It seems to me that the scientists have lost touch with what they were up to. They saw themselves as in a battle with the sceptics rather than advancing scientific knowledge."

Professor Mike Hulme, a fellow researcher of Jones at the University of East Anglia and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, said: "The attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organisation within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science."

There could, however, be another reason why the unit rejected requests to see its data. This weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data. Tucked away on its website is this statement: "Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites ... We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (ie, quality controlled and homogenised) data."

If true, it is extraordinary. It means that the data on which a large part of the world's understanding of climate change is based can never be revisited or checked. Pielke said: "Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. [The unit] is basically saying, `Trust us'."

WHERE does this leave the climate debate? While the overwhelming belief of scientists is that the world is getting warmer and that humanity is responsible, sceptical voices are increasing. Lord Lawson, the Tory former chancellor, announced last week the creation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank, to "bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant". Lawson said: "Climate change is not being properly debated because all the political parties are on the same side, and there is an intolerance towards anybody who wants to debate it. It has turned climate change from being a political issue into a secular religion."

The public are understandably confused. A recent poll showed that 41% accept as scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made, while 32% believe the link is unproven and 15% said the world is not warming.

This weekend many of Jones's colleagues were standing by him. Tim Lenton, professor of earth system science at UEA, said: "We wouldn't have anything like the understanding of climate change that we do were it not for the work of Phil Jones and his colleagues. They have spent decades putting together the historical temperature record and it is good work." The problem is that, after the past week, both sceptics and the public will require even more convincing of that.

SOURCE



Big backdown. Shamed University of East Anglia to release climate data

This is still much less of a concession than it appears. It will only be data as "edited" by them which will appear -- unless their claim to have "lost" the raw data was a lie. It will still be interesting, though. Comparing their edited data with any available sources of raw data should be MOST instructive. It will reveal any biases in their editing methods -- and expect plenty of those. It is precisely such comparisons that they have obviously been fearing for years

Leading British scientists who were accused of manipulating climate change data have agreed to publish their figures in full. The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics. In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.

The publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre. The full data, when disclosed, is certain to be scrutinised by both sides in the fierce debate.

A grandfather with a training in electrical engineering dating back more than 40 years emerged from the leaked emails as a leading climate sceptic trying to bring down the scientific establishment on global warming. David Holland, who describes himself as a David taking on the Goliath that is the prevailing scientific consensus, is seeking prosecutions against some of Britain's most eminent academics for allegedly holding back information in breach of disclosure laws. Mr Holland, of Northampton, complained to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) last week after the leaked emails included several Freedom of Information requests he had submitted to the CRU, and scientists' private responses to them.

Within hours, a senior complaints officer in the ICO wrote back by email: "I have started to examine the issues that you have raised in your letter and I am currently liaising with colleagues in our Enforcement and Data Protection teams as to what steps to take next." The official also promised to investigate other universities linked to the CRU, which is one of the world's leading authorities on temperature levels and has helped to prove that man-made global warming not only exists but will have catastrophic consequences if not tackled urgently. Mr Holland is convinced the threat has been greatly exaggerated.

In one email dated May 28, 2008, one academic writes to a colleague having received Mr Holland's request: "Oh MAN! Will this crap ever end??"

Mr Holland, who graduated with an external degree in electrical engineering from London University in 1966 before going on to run his own businesses, told The Sunday Telegraph: "It's like David versus Goliath. Thanks to these leaked emails a lot of little people can begin to make some impact on this monolithic entity that is the climate change lobby." He added: "These guys called climate scientists have not done any more physics or chemistry than I did. A lifetime in engineering gives you a very good antenna. It also cures people of any self belief they cannot be wrong. You clear up a lot of messes during a lifetime in engineering. I could be wrong on global warming - I know that - but the guys on the other side don't believe they can ever be wrong."

Professor Trevor Davies, the university's Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement, said yesterday: "CRU's full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements. It is worth reiterating that our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data."

Among the leaked emails disclosed last week were an alleged note from Professor Phil Jones, 57, the director of the CRU and a leading target of climate change sceptics, to an American colleague describing the death of a sceptic as "cheering news"; and a suggestion from Prof Jones that a "trick" is used to "hide the decline" in temperature. They even include threats of violence. One American academic wrote to Prof Jones: "Next time I see Pat Michaels [a climate sceptic] at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

Dr Michaels, tracked down by this newspaper to the Cato Institute in Washington DC where he is a senior fellow in environmental studies, said last night: "There were a lot of people who thought I was exaggerating when I kept insisting terrible things are going on here. "This is business as usual for them. The world might be surprised but I am not. These guys have an attitude."

Prof Jones, who has refused to quit despite calls even from within the green movement, said last week in a statement issued through University of East Anglia, "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues." He suggested the theft of emails and publication first on a Russian server was "a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks".

He added: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.

SOURCE



New leader for the UK Independence Party

Lord Pearson of Rannoch has been elected leader of UKIP. It should be interesting: as I reported last month, the new man has said he will make the fight against radical Islam a major focus for the party.

Today The Times reported: "A UKIP source said that if Lord Pearson or Mr Batten were elected “You are going to see quite a lot stronger position from us. Nigel has always been afraid of the Islam thing backfiring. But the BNP are taking ownership of issues that have not been addressed by Labour, the Conservatives or the Lib Dems and they need addressing.”

So I imagine UKIP will now probably make immigration and radical Islam as much their thing as Europe, and move closer to the Dutch Freedom Party, whose leader Geert Wilders is an ally of Pearson. It might not make them the darlings of White City, but it will play well to the public, many of whom are horrified about the direction the country is taking, and who want to physically puke every time they see a Westminster MP on television, but who are not prepared for the mental leap of voting for the BNP.

SOURCE



Promotion of failure by Britain's school inspectorate

A whistleblower tells how her fellow school inspectors fret more over pupils’ lunch boxes than their literacy

One day last summer I found myself sharing a table with three seven-year-olds in an inner-city primary school. It was chaos. The three children were giggling, kicking each other and chatting. Their attention was on what was immediately in front of them — each other. Somewhere on the periphery of our vision, the teacher walked about, struggling to keep order. Elsewhere, behind our heads, hung a whiteboard with work on it — gleefully ignored.

I was getting crosser and crosser. It was not just that my knees were hurting nor that the girl opposite, with striped bobbles at the end of each plait, had spat something pink and sticky onto my handbag. No, what upset me was simple. Nobody was learning anything.

When I helped Cedric, the boy next to me, with his comprehension, I got a shock. He could barely read, let alone write an answer to the question. He shrugged, threw a rubber at the girl with the bobbles and was sent out of the class.

It was the last straw. I liked Cedric, who was obviously bright. I forgot I was meant to be an observer and confronted the teacher. Instead of sending children out, I said, why not improve discipline and concentration? We could rearrange the tables to face her and she could stand in front of the board. She looked at me with horror. “The pupils are working together, directing their own learning,” she said, her voice almost drowned by noise. Had I not appreciated what was going on?

Ofsted’s annual report to parliament, submitted last week, makes clear this is taking place across the country. More than a third of schools are providing inadequate teaching. Also last week Sir Stuart Rose, chairman of Marks & Spencer, one of the nation’s biggest employers of school-leavers, summed up the implications of the incident I had witnessed: “They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.”

I have spent the past year visiting schools and interviewing teachers, pupils and parents in an attempt to find out why black Caribbean and white working-class boys are failing. Again and again I saw the dire impact of educational ideology and government initiatives on children’s lives. A 16-year-old heroin dealer from Streatham, south London, summed up the effect this had on him: “School shatters your dreams before you get anywhere.”

Ofsted’s report blames schools and teachers for the shortcomings. What I saw made me think further: what about Ofsted’s inspection process? How much is it to blame for what is going wrong?

Shortly after encountering Cedric, I was in a scruffy south London sandwich bar. My informant had insisted on meeting there because she feared being seen with me. Amy (not her real name) was an Ofsted inspector and she was very angry. She had taught English for 20 years and had inspected schools for more than five. Far from protecting the education of our children, she told me, Ofsted inspectors were “ actively discouraged from inspecting what really matters”. Take reading and writing: despite the introduction of a literacy hour and a big increase in spending on education, a third of 14-year-olds have a reading age of 11 or below. One in five has a reading age of nine.This is an extraordinarily high level of failure. Why do we accept it?

There is compelling evidence that synthetic phonics is the best method of teaching children to read. Unfortunately, in the surreal world of education, success is not enough. However good the evidence, synthetic phonics is unfashionable among teachers such as Cedric’s because it depends on direct teaching, not learning through play.

In her report, Christine Gilbert, the Ofsted chief, blamed primary schools for the fact that a third of pupils start secondary school without a grounding in the basics. This is disingenuous. It is her inspectors who are not enforcing the rules — as Amy learnt in an inner-city primary school with weak Sat scores. She asked the chief inspector why nobody was checking the reading method used. Was it synthetic phonics and how well was it being taught? He shrugged and said: “I don’t ask the question.” Presumably it was contrary to his educational philosophy. Amy, outraged, complained to Ofsted. And was duly “fobbed off”.

Ofsted’s lack of interest in these basic skills is clear from the self-evaluation report every inspected school must present. Amy pulled one from her bag. It was dauntingly thick and contained 48,000 words: of those, a mere 12 dealt with literacy and numeracy. They read: “School X promotes good basic skills, especially in literacy, numeracy and ICT.” Amy dismissed this as “wish fulfilment”. She went on: “It ‘promotes’ but what does it achieve? It says nothing about achievement.” Amy wanted to replace the useless self-evaluation with maths and reading tests done by Ofsted inspectors without warning: “That would make schools sit up and take notice.”

What was Amy allowed to inspect? She sighed. Ofsted orders inspectors to concentrate on social welfare, behaviour and attendance. They have to check if children are “independent learners” in charge of their own education and if a child enjoys “ownership” of its work. Work should not be corrected in red ink by the teacher.

This, like many educational fads, misses the point. Amy put the low standard of writing, even in good schools, down to the low standard of marking. She was shocked to see that a child’s work was often marked only one in three times for accuracy. Even then, children were not asked to write corrections.

When she complained — again — to the chief inspector, “I was rapped over the knuckles for ‘discouraging’ the children. Well, it’s going to be a lot more discouraging when they get to 14 and can’t read the sign on the front of a bus”.

As for government initiatives, “don’t even get me started”, said Amy. “I spend more time looking in children’s lunch boxes then testing their literacy.” In the topsy-turvy world of state education a fizzy drink causes more horror than poor spelling.

The latest buzzword initiative is “community cohesion”. Ofsted inspectors must ensure that a school “has developed an understanding of its own community in a local and national context, including an awareness of each of the three strands of faith, ethnicity and culture, and the socioeconomic dimension”. Nor is that all. Each school has to demonstrate it “has planned and taken an appropriate set of actions, based upon its analysis of its context, to promote community cohesion within the school and beyond the school community”. What does this mean? And why is a body guilty of such gobbledegook in charge of our children’s education? There is no mention of the impact that illiterate teenage boys have on community cohesion.

As well as ideological fads, Ofsted is subject to political pressure. The emphasis is on what makes the government look good rather than what might benefit pupils. Take the “deprivation factor”. A school can be well below average in Sats results but still be classed as satisfactory purely because of its intake. Schools with ethnic minorities, for example, parents without college education, children with special educational needs and even too many boys, all contribute to the deprivation factor. This is nothing more than an excuse for failure. A “deprivation factor” is not going to get a young man a job, buy him a house or take him on holiday.

Progress of learners is another dodgy item on the inspectors’ list. “We are besotted by progress,” said Amy. “The majority of the Ofsted report is based on what the school plans — not on what is actually going on in the classroom.” As long as a school demonstrates progress, it can achieve a “good” and sometimes an “outstanding” Ofsted report — even if the result is still below average. This emphasis on progress has serious implications. A good report means the school will not be inspected so frequently. It misleads parents and the public. Amy pointed out: “If the end result is still weak, however much improvement there has been, how does that help the child?”

Now we came to the crux of what had made her so angry. She leant towards me and said: “We forget that for these children this is their only chance of an education.”

Back in the primary school it was break time. In the staff room the teachers complained that the boys misbehaved every afternoon. They saw this as immutable. I suggested the PE teacher organise football every lunch break. The teachers — female and two stone overweight — looked at me as if I was talking an alien language. They dismissed competitive sport as promoting “negative feelings among our children”.

Cedric had spent his surplus energy putting a schoolmate’s head down the loo and was confined to the library. I showed him a book on castles. He had never seen a castle. He was immediately engaged and asked intelligent questions. In the afternoon he lasted barely 10 minutes in class before being sent to stand in the corridor.

I left the school gloomy. I was interviewing teenagers and young men in their twenties. I knew what lay ahead for bright, energetic boys like Cedric. Our warped inspection process, the emphasis on government initiatives and ideological fads create countless victims. Cedric possesses talents that should be the making of him. Instead he is already another statistic of failure.

SOURCE



British "regulator" is simply making schools worse

Ofsted has become a Left-wing front dedicated to maintaining the pretence that schools under Labour are getting better all the time, writes Simon Heffer.

Things are not looking fabulous for Ofsted, which last year soaked up £222 million in ensuring that schools get progressively worse and pupils progressively thicker. Friends in the education world tell me much has changed since the golden age of Chris Woodhead, and the body has become a Left-wing front dedicated to maintaining the pretence that schools under Labour are getting better all the time. I do not support wholesale retribution against Labour placemen should we have a new government, but the future of Christine Gilbert – Ofsted chief and wife of Tony McNulty, a Labour MP and former minister who recently had to apologise for financial irregularities – should surely lie outside her present field.

SOURCE



There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.





29 November, 2009

Investigation into NHS deaths after hospital scandals

An immediate investigation to uncover the true extent of death rates across the NHS has been ordered by the Health Secretary after scandals at two hospital trusts. Amid claims that patients are dying due to poor care in at least 27 hospitals around the country, Andy Burnham said that patient safety was paramount and must take precedence above all else.

His comments come after the head of a foundation trust in Colchester, Essex, was sacked over concerns about high death rates, leadership and waiting times. Failings in patient care had previously been linked to the deaths of between 70 and 400 patients at Basildon and Thurrock NHS Foundation Trust, also in Essex.

Mr Burnham used a speech at the Royal College of Midwives conference in Manchester to promise tougher action, saying that he had told the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to “establish immediately whether there are any other trusts at which similar issues demand immediate investigation”.

Monitor, which oversees NHS foundation trusts, removed Richard Bourne as chairman of Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust yesterday after the trust failed to meet waiting time targets for nine months. A taskforce of senior doctors and nurses was also sent to force improvements at Basildon and Thurrock after a damning report found poor hygiene and standards of care. The death rate at the trust was about a third higher than the national average, while at Colchester it was about 12 per cent higher.

Dozens of trusts could now be investigated by the CQC, which monitors data on mortality rates for all trusts in England. Overall, there have been 121 alerts on high death rates over the past two years that have required investigations. The alerts, based on information from the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College London and the CQC, are triggered if numbers of deaths among hospital patients are significantly higher than expected.

The Conservatives claimed that at least 25 other hospital trusts had death rates higher than the national average last year, with at least 3,100 more deaths than would have been expected in 2007-08.

Cynthia Bower, the chief executive of the CQC, welcomed Mr Burnham’s request. She said: “We are constantly vigilant about safety on behalf of patients. This includes monitoring death rates across the NHS as well as other quality of care issues. “Statistics can raise questions but cannot always provide answers. You need to follow up by carrying out inspections, talking to staff and listening to people who use the services and that is what CQC does. We can and do act swiftly wherever we find reasons for concern.”

The Patients Association said that people had been appallingly let down by standards of care at the two trusts in Essex.

The Colchester trust, which serves about 370,000 people in northeast Essex, had slipped from “excellent” to “fair”, according to the CQC’s rating last year. Sir Peter Dixon has been appointed interim chairman of the trust.

At Basildon and Thurrock, CQC inspectors had found blood-splattered equipment and soiled mattresses. Equipment that should have been used once was being used repeatedly and resuscitation room equipment was past its use-by date.

SOURCE



It's time for Men's Lib: Why we're witnessing the beginning of a men's movement

I put up yesterday a comment on this from a male writer. The British writer below is female -- a mother of sons. While the flood of anti-men advertisements is certainly offensive (and unwise), I am nonetheless slightly amused by this "issue". My view is that only rather neurotic middle class males will obsess about their "role". Most men will simply follow their instincts and will find lots of women ready to go along with that -- particularly Asian and working-class women. Women who want to wear the pants will find themselves high and dry (with no children to bless their old age) most of the time -- with the men they might fancy having a Chinese or other East Asian lady on their arm. There is certainly a lot of that in Australia (Australia's population is around 10% East Asian) and on American university campuses (where the common combination of big men and East Asian women is rather jealously referred to as "yellow fever"). And Britain's out-of-control immigration should be making a fair few East Asian women available there. Competition weeds out wrong bets in personal relationships too -- JR

For me, it began with a mortgage application. It was the 1970s, and I was young, ambitious and proud of my financial independence. The time had come, I thought, to buy my own home. I was quickly brought down to earth by my bank manager, who informed me that I would need the application countersigned by 'your husband or father'.

At that moment, the light bulb of feminism went on in my head - exactly as it was doing for a whole generation of women at roughly the same time. How well I remember the shock, horror and ridicule faced by the female of the species when we began to ask society at large whether it was truly our lot to be simply sugar and spice and all things nice. That's why we grouped together to discuss our health, our education, our place in work and how to be good wives and mothers without, as the novelist Rebecca West put it, being a doormat.

How ironic that, 30 years on, it's the turn of men to start asking the same kind of questions about their place in the world. We are witnessing the beginnings of a men's movement, with newly-formed groups of young men who have set out to find answers to the vexing question of how modern men are supposed to behave.

Two such groups have recently announced their existence and their purpose. At Manchester University, there is MENS Society - Masculinity Exploring Network and Support. Ben Wild, who's a history and politics student, has set up the group because he feels young men find it hard to live up to an idealised masculine role.

By that, I suspect he means it's not every guy who can shine on the rugby field, bring home top quality bacon and change a nappy, while rustling up a cordon bleu dinner and ironing a pristine shirt.

The truth is that, in 2009, men are every bit as as oppressed by unrealistic expectations and outdated stereotypes as women. Mr Wild's plan, he says, is to hold discussions where young men explore what masculinity means, and ask to what extent they contribute to sexism and gender stereotyping. For his pains, he's accused by his female counterparts of undermining women. Quite how women are undermined by a young, thoughtful man openly contributing to a debate we've long been asking them to consider, utterly defeats me. Encouragement is what's required, not damnation. Imagine our outrage if that ridicule was directed by men towards women's groups.

A similar organisation has been introduced to Oxford University by a 20-year-old student, Alex Linsley. His Oxford Man Collective (M-Co) advertised for members with the somewhat predictable slogan 'Have you got balls? If you have, how does that make you feel?' He explains he wants to discuss the confusion that faces his male contemporaries, who are struggling to know what it means to be a good man. He says there are two conflicting examples: the sensitive, all-caring, 'feminised' type, or the hard, 'take no c**p' from anybody figure. He acknowledges that neither extreme is particularly helpful, but says there may be things to be learned from both.

Kat Wall, the Oxford Vice President for Women, is said to have accused the group of gender stereotyping, saying she hopes they will work with women to facilitate discussions on masculinity. Why on earth should they? No women's group would have allowed men to take part in a discussion on what was expected of femininity. We women have spent the past 40-odd years revising our own place in the world, and have brought about a 'genderquake' as a result. The home and the workplace have been turned upside down by women's aspirations.

Surely we should be welcoming the young men who want to work out for themselves what kind of man 21st- century woman wants to share her life with.

The truth is that women have changed, and the world has changed. This is largely something to celebrate, but nobody should ever pretend that change isn't sometimes uncomfortable and confusing. This is the first generation of men who will come of age without the fixed presumption that they will be the 'breadwinner' and 'head of household'. Some may find that a relief - but undeniably it has left many questioning what exactly their role in life should be. After all, if their wife is better at running the home, mothering the children and earning money, what use is a man?

Today's young men are going to fall in love with women who have grown up with an assumption of equality, and who are most likely as well educated and ambitious as they are (at least until they have children, but that's a debate for another day). How do they live, work and love with women like that? What will these girls want from their men? These are important questions for everyone.

As girls outstrip boys at every stage of education, and working-class white boys in particular rapidly become a lost generation, it is becoming imperative that we address the same issues of discrimination and exclusion for boys and men as we once did for women. As the mother of two beloved sons, I've done my best to give them the opportunity to be the kind of men they wanted to be, and not feel they had to follow any traditional pattern laid down for them.

I've shared their anger at television adverts that portray their sex as hopeless or just plain stupid, and joined their cries of 'that's sexist' at the TV stereotypes of men who can't even wash their own shirts.

When they've played rugby, I've marched up and down the touchline, yelling encouragement. If they've been hurt or bullied, I've held them tight and wiped away their tears, never, ever saying: 'Come on, son - boys don't cry.'

Because masculinity is every bit as complex as femininity. A woman can play football, run a bank, wear lipstick and sob her heart out over Brief Encounter; but it's only through the long struggles of feminism that the football and the bank job have been permitted. Now, the Brothers, like the Sisters, need to do it for themselves and find their own way to define their place in society.

What's fascinating is that it's never really made sense in the past for men - traditionally the holders of power - to examine their own role in the world. Why would you bother when the society you live in endorses a status quo in which a wife is cook, cleaner, child carer and staunch support? But that society no longer exists, and now it's young men who are floundering far more than young women are.

The founders of the new men's groups are tremendously courageous, given male silence on these issues, to admit that their sex lacks support networks, and that they need to talk to each other about their health, their ambitions and a host of other social issues far more troublesome today than they ever were for their generation's fathers.

Alex Linsley, the M-Co founder, points to the high number of young men between the ages of 18 and 25 who commit suicide. He is right to be concerned. Professor Louis Appleby, the National Director for Mental Health, has referred to an 'epidemic of young male suicide'. Nine hundred young men kill themselves every year - that's 75per cent of all suicides in the under-35 age group. This is the group that rarely comes in contact with health professionals. Girls go to the doctor to discuss everything from contraception to difficult periods to jabs to prevent cervical cancer; boys hardly ever see their GP. We have yet to see the kind of health awareness campaigns, support groups and funding initiatives directed at male issues such as prostate cancer as we have, for example, at breast cancer.

Nor are young men encouraged to seek help when they have worries. Parents traditionally encourage their daughters to talk about their emotions; sons are raised with a stiff upper lip - instructed in a style of masculinity that no longer fits into our changing world. They hide their misery away in the 'Boys will be boys'/ 'Lads tough it out' culture that is sending far too many of them to an early grave.

When they're older, those who survive still suffer. How many men do you know would rather die than go the doctor with a lump in a testicle? How many men would call a friend to discuss a problem they're having with their family? A woman would be on the phone right away and find her way through with the support of a pal. A man may well fall through the net unsupported. Three- quarters of people who go missing each year are male, as are 85 per cent of people who sleep rough.

So good luck to these young men who acknowledge there's a crisis in masculinity. It's up to them now to try to sort it out.

SOURCE



Cardiologist will fight crazy British libel laws 'to defend free speech’

A British doctor who is being sued for libel after criticising an American company’s research has pledged to turn the action into a test case for freedom of speech. Peter Wilmshurst, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, told The Times that he aims to use a public-interest defence to fight the claim from NMT Medical and establish the principle that scientists may engage freely in academic debate.

He said he was prepared to risk losing his home to take the case to trial because victory would set a precedent protecting other scientists from “legal bullying”. Dr Wilmshurst said: “I have got a responsibility to fight this. There is a fundamental principle of science at stake here. People have to be free to challenge research.”

There is growing concern about the use of England’s draconian libel laws to stifle expert scrutiny of scientific evidence. Simon Singh, the science writer, has been sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association over an article in which he questioned the evidence that spinal manipulation could treat childhood conditions such as asthma and colic.

Many scientific journals admit that they now seek legal advice before publishing some academic papers, and several websites have withdrawn scientific articles claimed as defamatory because of the prohibitive costs of defending such actions.

A petition to keep libel laws out of science has been signed by nearly 19,000 supporters, including Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society; Sir Mark Walport, the director of the Wellcome Trust; and Sir David King, a former government chief scientist.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, who spoke to Dr Wilmshurst last week, said that he was preparing reforms to the libel laws. “What concerns me is that the current arrangements are being used by big corporations to restrict fair comment, not always by journalists but also by academics,” he told The Sunday Times.

A further concern is the growth of “libel tourism”, fuelled by the greater ease of suing successfully in England than in the US, and the English courts’ willingness to accept claims from litigants with few connections to Britain.

A report published last week by English PEN, a writers’ charity, and Index on Censorship, which campaigns for freedom of speech, recommended reforms, including a requirement that 10 per cent of the circulation of a publication accused of libel must be in Britain for a claim to be heard here. It also suggests a £10,000 cap on damages and a requirement that plaintiffs prove that alleged defamatory statements are both false and damaging.

Dr Wilmshurt’s case began with his involvement in a study of a medical device made by NMT called Starflex, designed to close a type of hole in the heart known as a patent foramen ovale (PFO). The study investigated Starflex as a potential treatment for migraine, which is significantly more common among people with a PFO, but failed to find benefits. At a cardiology conference in Washington in 2007, Dr Wilmshurst criticised NMT in relation to the research. His comments were reported by Heartwire, a website, prompting NMT to sue him.

Dr Wilmshurst and his solicitor, Mark Lewis, will meet NMT’s legal team next month for mediation. If no deal is reached, the case is expected to go to trial. Dr Wilmshurst said that he would settle out of court if NMT issued a statement recognising his right to criticise scientific research. “They always have the option of dropping the action and paying costs, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with that,” he said. “We also want them to say they recognise my right to have said this. They should recognise that even though they don’t agree, this is an expert opinion and they shouldn’t have sued.”

Mr Lewis said: “There is a reason not to settle, which is that this case is of wider interest for all scientists, and for the public who relies on them to assess medical research.” Libel law, Mr Lewis said, was having “not so much a chilling effect as a killing effect” on scientific debate, by making researchers think twice before challenging findings with which they disagreed.

SOURCE



British teenager who tried to rape girl, 11, avoids jail in 'pathetic' ruling

A teenager who subjected an 11-year-old girl to a horrific sexual attack has escaped a prison sentence in a ruling branded 'pathetic' by the victim's family. The 15-year-old boy sexually assaulted the youngster as she was playing near her home. He attempted to rape the schoolgirl - leaving the victim frightened and deeply traumatised.

However, after admitting his crime, the teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was handed a 12-month referral order - meaning his punishment includes reporting to a panel of local volunteers to 'address his offending behaviour'. It could mean that he has to meet his victim and her family to apologise for the attack. The maximum sentence for attempted rape of a child is life imprisonment.

The girl's mother, who also cannot be identified, said she was 'disgusted' the teenager had not received a harsher punishment. 'This whole thing has ripped our family apart - when I found out what he'd got, I felt sick,' she said. 'The trauma has been unbearable. My daughter is a different girl now and will have to live with this forever. All he has to do is attend some meetings. 'We are not happy. The whole family are devastated. We've been through a horrible thing.'

The girl was attacked near her home in Chorley, Lancashire, on May 19 by the teenager, who lives nearby. At Preston youth court earlier this month he pleaded guilty to attempted rape and sexual assault. District Judge Peter Ward imposed the referral order and ordered the teenager to pay £85 court costs.

Sentencing guidelines state the orders should be considered when a youth is in court for the first time and admits their offence. He will now have to attend meetings of a youth offender panel consisting of two local volunteers and an expert in young offenders. It will draw up a contract aimed at repairing the harm caused by his offence - possibly meeting the girl or her family if they are willing - and preventing him committing more offences, for example, ensuring he attends school.

Such a conviction is considered 'spent' once the contract has been successfully completed, meaning it would not ordinarily be disclosed to any future employer.

Critics of referral orders say they can be a soft option, but supporters say keeping first-time offenders out of the criminal justice system helps prevent them being sucked into a cycle of reoffending.

Last night the girl's family's MP, Labour's Lindsay Hoyle, said: 'People will be absolutely appalled with this sentence and the way it has been dealt with. 'The punishment certainly doesn't seem to fit the crime and it should be referred back to the courts to be re-looked at. 'The courts have taken a softly, softly approach and people will rightfully be disgusted.'

Claude Knights, director of child protection charity Kidscape, said: 'This must have been a very frightening ordeal for the girl, and imposing such a lenient sentence sends out completely the wrong message. 'The teenager ought to be held in some sort of secure environment to make sure he really understands what a serious crime it was and prevent him from committing more crimes.'

Earlier this year a 16-year-old boy who raped a seven-year-old boy was freed by a court in Manchester and given a community order, only to abduct and rape a boy of five just days later. He has now been locked up indefinitely.

SOURCE



Gutless British diplomats

Thousands of pounds in unsolicited public donations have been received by a University of Oxford college in support of a scholarship honouring an Iranian student murdered during a street protest in Tehran. But the public support for commemorating Neda Soltan contrasts sharply with the attitude of the British Government. The Times has learnt that it would have advised Queen’s College against establishing the scholarship, saying that Iran would regard it as a provocative move.

Diplomatic sources told The Times that the graduate scholarship in Ms Soltan’s name has driven “another nail into the coffin” of an already strained Iranian/British relationship. Critics will see this as further evidence of the Government’s reluctance to confront the Iranian regime despite its repeated claims that Britain fomented the protests that followed the hotly disputed presidential election in June, its arrest of the British Embassy’s Iranian staff and its expulsion of the BBC’s correspondent.

Prominent members of the Iranian opposition have sharply criticised the Government’s decision to send the British Ambassador to President Ahmadinejad’s inauguration, accusing it of ignoring human rights abuses in its desire to engage the regime on nuclear issues.

Since Queen’s established the Neda Soltan scholarship with two anonymous donations last month, almost £15,000 has been been sent in by former students, parents and members of the public. Ms Soltan, 26, was shot dead on June 20 during a street protest against a presidential election result that the opposition alleges was rigged. She has become a worldwide symbol of the regime’s brutality.

A spokesman for Queen’s College said that the decision to set up the scholarship was not a political one, but he was not surprised that it was perceived in that light. He added that if the college had decided to turn down the initial funds of £4,000 from two private donors this would have also been viewed as political. “One of the initial donors has also indicated that he will commit £10,000 over the coming five years to support the scholarship further. The college is of course pleased to receive donations that will support one of its primary aims, which is to fund bursaries and scholarships which help students who might otherwise be unable to study at Oxford.”

A senior diplomatic source said that the Government would have advised Queen’s College not to set up the scholarship when Britain is desperately trying to free local embassy staff in Iran who have been detained by the regime for their alleged involvement in the protests. “If we were asked, we would have advised against it because it was always going to be deemed as provocative by the Iranian Government,” the source said. “But Oxford University did not ask us about setting up the scholarship, and does not have to because it is an independent educational institution.”

The source said that Iran has wrongly accused the Government of helping to establish the scholarship, which prompted a furious letter from the deputy Iranian Ambassador in London to the Queen’s College Provost, Professor Paul Madden. The source said that the need to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a far bigger issue for Britain to contend with than the scholarship. “It is really a drop in the ocean, considering all the other problems that we are dealing with,” he added.

SOURCE



Central England Temperature series

The very long thermometer-reading series from central England (from 1659 on) is of huge interest because it does NOT rely on dubious proxies -- and it shows the 20th century as being unexceptional. I have therefore made a number of allusions to it on this blog.

The Warmists have noted it too and one of them -- Tamino -- has gone to work and made a hockey stick out of it -- using the expected dubious statistical techniques. Tamino is one of the guys mentioned in the hacked CRU emails.

That his results are incredible can I think most convincingly be seen from his plot of the raw data (below)



It is clearly a random walk and any trend up or down is a statistical creation rather than anything real. One of my readers taken an interest in tracking down just what Tamino did to get his magical result. He offers the following graphic:



LARGER VERSION of the graphic HERE

He comments: Tamino's work takes a bit of following. I initially thought his moving average had been moved to match a "mere smoothing function". I was wrong. He simply used a centered average. The "mere smoothing function" is one of the most important breakthroughs of all time. The Savitzky-Golay filter of 1964 can remove noise without softening peaks. I next thought he had smoothed the moving average instead of the data. A second mistake. With more serious software I easily reproduced his graph from original data. He has taken advantage of a severe end-effect which requires lots of homework to comprehend. He also used a lowest order filter setting so peaks *are* in fact quashed in the middle as well! Higher order settings let peaks breathe but still have huge end effects. End effect means his upswing in today's news may be retroactively pulled back down if cooler years are added in the future. It will take 15 years for that part of the graph to become etched in stone. Over 200 commenters failed to detect such subterfuge

As an old FORTRAN-using statistical analysis programmer myself, I am well aware of how you can lie with statistics. That is why it is important to do courses in statistics -- so you can spot it when you are being "had". And much of my academic writing was devoted to pointing out how statistical nullities were being paraded as if they told us something. So it is no surprise to see the statistical jiggery-pokery that has been going on in climate science. Mountains are regularly made out of pimples and if there are not even pimples to be had, one will be created.



CRU data-fudging again

A French scientist’s fine-grain temperature data show results quite different from CRU

By Phil Green, a statistician

The global average temperature is calculated by climatologists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The temperature graph the CRU produces from its monthly averages is the main indicator of global temperature change used by the International Panel on Climate Change, and it shows a steady increase in global lower atmospheric temperature over the 20th century. Similar graphs for regions of the world, such as Europe and North America, show the same trend. This is consistent with increasing industrialization, growing use of fossil fuels, and rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

It took the CRU workers decades to assemble millions of temperature measurements from around the globe. The earliest measurements they gathered came from the mid 19th century, when mariners threw buckets over the side of their square riggers and hauled them up to measure water temperature. Meteorologists increasingly started recording regular temperature on land around the same time. Today they collect measurements electronically from national meteorological services and ocean-going ships.

Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU’s average temperature data doesn’t jibe with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up by about 1 C and have not shown any warming since. This pattern cannot be explained by rising carbon dioxide concentrations, unless some critical threshold was reached in 1987; nor can it be explained by climate models.

Courtillot and Jean-Louis Le Mouël, a French geo-magneticist, and three Russian colleagues first came into climate research as outsiders four years ago. The Earth’s magnetic field responds to changes in solar output, so geomagnetic measurements are good indicators of solar activity. They thought it would be interesting to compare solar activity with climatic temperature measurements.

Their first step was to assemble a database of temperature measurements and plot temperature charts. To do that, they needed raw temperature measurements that had not been averaged or adjusted in any way. Courtillot asked Phil Jones, the scientist who runs the CRU database, for his raw data, telling him (according to one of the ‘Climategate’ emails that surfaced following the recent hacking of CRU’s computer systems) “there may be some quite important information in the daily values which is likely lost on monthly averaging.” Jones refused Courtillot’s request for data, saying that CRU had “signed agreements with national meteorological services saying they would not pass the raw data onto third parties.” (Interestingly, in another of the CRU emails, Jones said something very different: “I took a decision not to release our [meteorological] station data, mainly because of McIntyre,” referring to Canadian Steve McIntyre, who helped uncover the flaws in the hockey stick graph.)

Courtillot and his colleagues were forced to turn to other sources of temperature measurements. They found 44 European weather stations that had long series of daily minimum temperatures that covered most of the 20th century, with few or no gaps. They removed annual seasonal trends for each series with a three-year running average of daily minimum temperatures. Finally they averaged all the European series for each day of the 20th century.

CRU, in contrast, calculates average temperatures by month — rather than daily — over individual grid boxes on the Earth’s surface that are 5 degrees of latitude by 5 degrees of longitude, from 1850 to the present. First it makes hundreds of adjustments to the raw data, which sometimes require educated guesses, to try to correct for such things as changes in the type and location of thermometers. It also combines air temperatures and water temperatures from the sea. It uses fancy statistical techniques to fill in gaps of missing data in grid boxes with few or no temperature measurements. CRU then adjusts the averages to show changes in temperature since 1961-1990.

CRU calls the 1961-1990 the “normal” period and the average temperature of this period it calls the “normal.” It subtracts the normal from each monthly average and calls these the monthly “anomalies.” A positive anomaly means a temperature was warmer than CRU’s normal period. Finally CRU averages the grid box anomalies over regions such as Europe or over the entire surface of the globe for each month to get the European or global monthly average anomaly. You see the result in the IPCC graph nearby, which shows rising temperatures.

The decision to consider the 1961-1990 period as ‘normal’ was CRUs. Had CRU chosen a different period under consideration, the IPCC graph would have shown less warming, as discussed in one of the Climategate emails, from David Parker of the UK meteorological office. In it, Parker advised Jones not to select a different period, saying “anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted.” That’s hardly a compelling scientific justification!

It is well known to statisticians that in any but the simplest data sets, there are many possible ways to calculate an indicator using averages. Paradoxically, and counter-intuitively, they often contradict each other. As a simple example of how the same data can be teased to produce divergent results, consider the batting averages of David Justice and Derek Jeter. For each of three years in 1995-97, Justice had a higher batting average than Jeter did. Yet, overall, Jeter had the highest batting average.

In addition to calculating temperature averages for Europe, Courtillot and his colleagues calculated temperature averages for the United States. Once again, their method yielded more refined averages that were not a close match with the coarser CRU temperature averages. The warmest period was in 1930, slightly above the temperatures at the end of the 20th century. This was followed by 30 years of cooling, then another 30 years of warming.

Courtillot’s calculations show the importance of making climate data freely available to all scientists to calculate global average temperature according to the best science. Phil Jones, in response to the email hacking, said that CRU’s global temperature series show the same results as “completely independent groups of scientists.” Yet CRU would not share its data with independent scientists such as Courtillot and McIntyre, and Courtillot’s series are clearly different.

At the upcoming Copenhagen conference, governments are expected to fail to agree to an ambitious plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Here’s a more modest, if mundane goal for them: They should agree to share the data from their national meteorological services so that independent scientists can calculate global climatic temperature and identify the roles of carbon dioxide and the sun in changing it.

SOURCE (See the original for graphics)



Immigrant exploitation of the British hospital system

Mapping out the strain on Britain's NHS: 243 sick babies treated in one London hospital ward.... and just 18 mothers come from Britain

Countless red dots scattered across the world map on the wall of a NHS hospital reveal the story of the changing face of Britain. Each dot denotes the background of a mother with a baby in the neonatal ward of London's Chelsea and Westminster hospital. The map was put up by hospital administrators to 'celebrate the ethnic diversity' of the sick children treated there, each at a cost of £1,400 a day. It shows dramatically how the NHS now treats patients from every corner of the globe.

The 243 mothers are from 72 different nations. They include Mongolia, the remotest regions of Russia, Japan, Africa, South America, swathes of Asia, Australasia and even Papua New Guinea. Only 18 mothers said they were from Britain.

The women were invited to put a dot on the map to 'represent' their home country. One, a London-born mother of a baby treated there earlier this summer, sent the Mail a photograph of the result. She said: 'Almost every cot and incubator at this wonderful unit was occupied by a baby with a foreign mother. Interpreters were on hand to make sure the mothers understood the doctors. 'Babies' lives are being saved and that is a good thing. Yet this seemed like a free-for-all.'

It is impossible to say how long each of the mothers has been in this country. But the fact is only a fraction of them declared themselves as having a British background. In theory, only a woman who has lived here legally for a year or has a student visa lasting more than six months is entitled to free NHS care when giving birth. Yet few hospitals are prepared to turn away a pregnant patient in the late stages of labour. Indeed, the Government recently issued an instruction telling them to admit such women without question.

Health Minister Ann Keen pronounced in July: 'We remain firmly committed to the requirement that immediately necessary or urgent treatment should never be denied or delayed from those that require it.'

Many nurses and doctors on the NHS frontline believe her words were dangerously naive, even an explicit invitation to heavily pregnant women to fly to Britain to have babies. Some have arrived at Chelsea and Westminster - and other London hospitals - straight from the airport with the ticket tags still on their suitcases.

Mothers-to-be target this country as 'health tourists' for a variety of reasons. Some do so because they face a difficult birth and want expert care unavailable in their home countries. Others have been told by doctors abroad that their baby will be born with a profound illness, needing a lifetime of treatment and medicines. They know the NHS will provide this with few questions asked even if the bill reaches millions of pounds.

The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital's neonatal ward treats 500 newborns each year from London and the south east. Many of the babies have been born prematurely or have inherited illnesses. They include those with ailments such as sickle cell anaemia (which is prevalent in African and Mediterranean communities, while almost unknown among those of northern European heritage), the HIV virus passed on from the mother, as well as deafness, blindness and devastating neurological problems common among ethnic communities in which marriages between cousins are the norm.

Today nearly 25 percent of babies in Britain have mothers who were born abroad. In London the figure is 50 percent. The boroughs of Newham and Brent have the highest percentage, 75 percent and 73 percent respectively. Even in Chelsea (an area less associated with immigration) the figure is 67 percent, according to a recent Government report.

Britain's population is expected to grow from 61 million to 74 million over the next 20 years, the Office for National Statistics said last week. The estimate is based on both the continuing high birthrate of migrant mothers and levels of immigration as well as the longer life expectancy of the entire population.

Meanwhile, at least three million foreigners have settled here legally since 1997 - a rate of 700 a day. Nearly a million more are living here illegally, the Home Office has admitted.

Bliss, a campaigning charity supporting families with premature and sick babies, recently said that the NHS needs 2,700 more neonatal nurses to cope with growing numbers of baby births. They now total 791,000 a year, up 33,000 from 2007.

Back at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, the colourful world baby map, proudly displayed on the wall for three months, was recently removed during construction work. Last night, a spokesperson for Chelsea and Westminster said that the hospital cared for patients from many different backgrounds, reflecting London's population. The map was intended to illustrate the diversity of the families of babies on the ward.

The hospital also issued the following statement: 'Chelsea and Westminster Hospital is a specialist referral centre and cares for patients of many different backgrounds, reflecting London’s very diverse population. 'Of the 550 babies admitted to our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) every year, a very small number of these are overseas patients. In 2009, there have been just two overseas admissions.

'The map was placed in the NICU nearly four years ago to provide the families of the babies we care for, as well as staff, with an opportunity to indicate their background if they wished. It is not an indication of country of residence or citizenship. 'It was intended to illustrate the diversity of staff working on the unit and the families of the babies we care for, to encourage everyone to reflect on different cultures, in a fun and informal way.

'Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s NICU provides intensive care, high dependency and special care facilities for babies and is a specialist referral centre for neonatal surgery.'

SOURCE



Must not call a youth a youth in Britain

We read:

"It is not a word usually associated with causing offence, even when those referred to have broken the law. But 'youth' has been banned from guidelines on the treatment of criminals aged 16 and 17 - because ministers think it is too demeaning. Instead, offenders must be referred to as 'young persons' in the latest code for prosecutors. The newly fashionable phrase is used 101 times in the document.

The change of wording was mocked yesterday by the Tories, who described it as the 'bizarre' invention of a new taboo. Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve added: 'Yet again, ministers have shown that they are more bothered about pandering to political correctness than coming down hard on the crime and antisocial behaviour that blights communities.'

Disapproval of language considered to give the wrong impression has been a hallmark of Labour's years in power. Its Youth Justice Board has tried to prevent 'gang' in case it criminalises youngsters who gather together. It prefers crime committed by such gatherings to be described as 'group-related'.

Source

I guess that Brits too now mostly realize that "youth" mostly means "black" when used in crime descriptions. Changing the labels will not change the reality of pervasive black crime, however. And word will always get around about that. Despite widespead media coverups, how many Americans don't know that blacks are on average much more dangerous than whites? Even Jesse Jackson knows that.

I wonder when pictures of offenders will be banned? African features looking at you from so many crime reports do add up to a pretty clear story eventually.





28 November, 2009

Another catastrophic British hospital

A hospital trust’s “systemic failings” have led to neglect, poor nursing and deaths, regulators have found. Problems at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Essex, included patients being left on dirty trolleys, high rates of infection and bedsores caused by poor hygiene and a lack of basic nursing care. Those contributed to an estimated 71 extra deaths last year among accident and emergency patients.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC), an NHS watchdog, said that the trust had reported “persistently high mortality rates” which had not improved, despite warnings. The commission’s inspectors, who conducted unannounced visits to Basildon and Thurrock over the past year, noted blood on floors, curtains, equipment trays and a child’s blood-pressure cuff, mould on life-support machines and resuscitation room equipment that was out of date. The trust was also found to be making patients wait up to ten hours in its emergency department rather than the national target of four hours.

The mortality rate for emergency admissions was 6.1 per cent last year. The national average is 4.4 per cent. Based on about 4,200 patients seen in A&E at the trust last year, this would have led to 255 deaths, an increase of more than 71 deaths compared with what would be expected according to average mortality rates.

The high death rate prompted comparison with the larger Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where an official report published in March found that appalling emergency care had led to between 400 and 1,200 patients dying needlessly.

Care at Basildon and Thurrock was rated as “good” by the commission in October. But it said that it had lost confidence in the ability of Basildon and Thurrock trust’s management to address the failings that it found on subsequent checks. It believes that the trust could be in breach of its foundation trust authorisation, and therefore has asked Monitor, the independent regulator of foundation trusts, to use its powers to take action. Monitor has the power to dismiss the board of the organisation or take further control.

Most of the inpatient care at the trust is provided at Basildon University Hospital, which has 777 beds. Outpatient care is provided at Orsett hospital.

The trust was one of the first in England to be granted foundation trust status in 2004, which affords it the freedom to manage its finances and a degree of independence from NHS control.

Cynthia Bower, the commission’s chief executive, said: “The trust has taken our concerns seriously but improvements are simply not happening fast enough.”

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesman, said: “People have a right to know how on earth a hospital can be rated ‘good’ a few weeks before such serious failings come to light. “This Government has set up a labyrinth of bodies and inspectors which are meant to ensure high quality standards in our hospitals but it simply isn’t working. This is yet another case where a hospital has passed the test on paper but where real patient safety has clearly been compromised.”

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: “It is unforgiveable if any lives have been needlessly lost. We need to know what happened after the Government found out about the tragedy at Stafford Hospital. Other hospitals with high mortality rates, such as Basildon and Thurrock, should have been looked at rapidly and effectively by regulators and ministers to ensure that patients were being treated safely.”

Mike O’Brien, a health minister, said that Monitor would rigorously oversee progress on the issues raised by the commission. “We expect these issues to be dealt with quickly and effectively to ensure high quality, safe care for patients,” he said. Michael Large, the trust chairman, said: “I want to reassure our local community that the safety and well-being of our patients is our highest priority. Monitor acknowledge that we have an effective programme in place to make further improvements.

“We welcome the opportunity to work with advisers to specifically focus on the areas where we need to make rapid changes. We have had expert independent clinical advice and nothing has pointed to a fundamental problem with clinical care.”

SOURCE



Maternity funding still not being delivered, British midwives claim

Millions of pounds of government funding intended to improve maternity care is still not reaching frontline services, midwives say. Despite a rising birthrate, nearly a fifth of the heads of midwifery said that their budget had been cut, and almost a third had been asked to reduce their budgets. Last year the Government promised £330 million of extra funding for maternity services, but this has not been ringfenced.

The results, from a survey across Britain by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), come as the Health Secretary is due to speak at the union’s conference in Manchester. Andy Burnham will today announce a new “Start4life” campaign highlighting the importance of breastfeeding and healthy eating from infancy.

The RCM said that 5,000 more midwives were needed to provide safe and quality care to new mothers. Ann Keen, a health minister, said that it was up to NHS trusts how to invest the additional money. “Where funding is not reaching maternity services I call on Heads of Midwifery to challenge their PCTs,” she said. “We recognise there are concerns around staff morale and attrition rates and we are working with the Royal Colleges and the NHS to address these areas.”

SOURCE



Poole — the British town with a Christmas tree that you can wipe your feet on



When is a Christmas tree not a Christmas tree? When it is a giant cone covered in what appears to be green doormats. Shoppers stared in bemusement at the mysterious object that landed in a shopping precinct in Poole, Dorset, this week. Some compared it to a giant traffic cone, a witch’s hat or a cheap special effect from an early episode of Doctor Who. The 33ft structure turned out to be their Christmas tree, designed according to the principles of health and safety, circa 2009.

Thus it has no trunk so it won’t blow over, no branches to break off and land on someone’s head, no pine needles to poke a passer-by in the eye, no decorations for drunken teenagers to steal and no angel, presumably because it would need a dangerously long ladder to place it at the top.

Last year Poole boasted a Norwegian fir draped with strings of coloured lights. It cost £500 and continued a decades-old tradition. The replacement, which is constructed on a metal frame overlaid with what appears to be artificial grass, cost £14,000 and comes with built-in fairy lights and hidden speakers to play Christmas tunes that will put shoppers in the festive mood. But the only mood apparent among shoppers who saw the tree yesterday was a bad one.

Karen Byron, a 54-year-old housewife, said: “It’s horrible. If you are going to have a fake tree then it ought to resemble a tree. You can get some really good fake trees but this is awful. It doesn’t feel Christmassy at all.” Bill Scott, 77, said: “This is a total disgrace and my sister thinks so too. I’m an army man and it would be wrong for me to express my real feelings in language other people might hear.” Gill Roberts, 52, said: “It looks like something that has been beamed down from outer space. It might look prettier in the dark with the lights on but it is the middle of a shopping precinct and hardly anyone will see it at night.”

The tree was commissioned by the Poole Town Centre Management Board because of fears that a real one would pose a hazard to shoppers. Richard Randall-Jones, the town centre manager, said that although a Norwegian fir might be cheaper, it still cost £3,500 to hoist into position, make safe and decorate. “People think you can just go into the woods, chop down a tree and put it up in the high street but if it blows over and kills someone then somebody is liable,” he said.

“We are a coastal town and so we have strict health-and-safety guidelines around making the Christmas tree safe due to the high winds we suffer. We have to have guy ropes and hoardings to stop it from falling over and hitting somebody. The public didn’t like all the ropes and hoardings so we came up with the cone tree. It looks really pretty at night. I challenge anyone to find a better tree in the area.”

Trish Glover, whose shop overlooks the cone, said: “I prefer a Christmas tree, not a big wizard’s hat or a lump of astroturf or something that belongs in the roadworks.”

Christmas trees are one of the most hazardous objects in the home, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. In 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 1,000 people needed hospital treatment for injuries inflicted by trees. They ranged from being poked in the eye to back injuries caused by moving the trees around.

SOURCE



British policing has 'lost its way', says top officer

And constant British government meddling has a lot to do with it

British policing has “lost its way” amid the “noise and clutter” of Government targets, initiatives and new laws, the chief of inspector of police has said. Denis O’Connor, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, told The Daily Telegraph that forces have “drifted away” from the core basics of frontline policing and serving the public.

The Government, local authorities and police chiefs have made “too many knee jerk reactions” by throwing new legislation and initiatives at the problems of law and order. “The principles of policing get drowned out in the noise,” Mr O’Connor said. “You need to look at the number of units and departments at the Home Office, all the officials and the different committees and ask this question: ‘Do they think about the principles and values of the British model of policing?’”

Centrally imposed targets have been criticised for distorting local police priorities to chase minor crimes. Red tape has diverted bobbies from the beat and Labour has also created new crimes at a rate of nearly one a day since 1997. A separate report today claims that police officers are only solving nine offences a year.

Mr O’Connor spoke after he unveiled a critical HMIC report into protest policing, following the G20 demonstrations in April. It disclosed that in public order law alone, there had been 61 amendments to legislation in the past six years. “Police are uncertain of their duties and the powers they may exercise,” the report said.

Mr O’Connor called for a return to the ideals defined by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, of which the most important was "the police are the public and the public are the police" and advocated an "approachable, impartial, accountable style of policing based on minimal force and anchored in public consent". He told the Telegraph: “That was an ideal but there’s been some drift away from that. We have lost our way.”

The Home Office has recently introduced a single target for police of improving public confidence, after years of officers chasing minor crimes to hit multiple targets.

Mr O’Connor said that centrally-imposed targets were a “well intentioned” measure to tackle problems such as anti-social behaviour but had become a problem when “the machinery came to dominate what police officers did” and took away their discretion. He added that police performance and accountability is still a “cluttered” landscape. “You have got Government, you have got regulators like myself, you’ve got local partnerships, you’ve got Government offices, a whole series of interests. “If you add it all together and put on a piece of paper the links to show who is providing information, who is asking for information, who is suggesting new initiatives … it makes the London Underground map look like a walk in the park. “There are just so many people, with so many different interests in play, it is very noisy. “I think the whole thing needs rationalising significantly. “That will hopefully give a better connection between the police and the people.”

The chief inspector said that he is working with officials at the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) who want to reform practices.

The Telegraph has highlighted how police have faced criticism for failing to visit every victim of crime, no matter how minor the offence, in a time-saving initiative which has seen a third of all crimes “screened out” by officers.

Last month, Mr O’Connor disclosed how his inspectors found that more than four out of five police forces were failing to respond adequately to the public. Some police stations were not open when advertised, and at one unnamed force almost one in five non-emergency calls were ignored during one month. In other forces calls to neighbourhood policing teams were never answered and websites carried out-of-date information about opening times and public meetings. “That does not do a lot for approachability,” Mr O’Connor said.

Last month Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Manchester, also criticised politicians' involvement in "whatever initiative tends to be going" — such as the anti-knife crime campaign, which was set up after a series of murders in London.

Mr O’Connor said that the public also find it hard to hold police to account because of over-complicated crime statistics and added that the impartiality of police was in “dangerous and difficult territory” when officers engaged in debates about issues such as the detainment of terrorism suspects for 90 days.

The chief inspector was speaking after he unveiled a critical report into public order policing, following the G20 protests in April in which officers were heavily criticised for their heavy handed and “militaristic” approach. The crux of the problem came from shortcomings in tactics, standards and leadership of specialist public order officers, because training was outdated and inconsistent.

Mr O’Connor called for the government to introduce a set of "overarching principles" to guide police on the use of force, informing officers about what constitutes appropriate behaviour in "all areas of policing business". He said that health and safety legislation which means officers have to assess the risk during their work has made the police “too defensive”. They were quick to put on their riot kit at public order events – sometimes giving them a “military” look.

Mr O’Connor added that when police were making arrests or searching properties they should consider keeping the impact to a minimum in the neighbourhood by being “smooth, quiet, and relatively discreet”. “I’m not sure people feel that’s always the case about the way some of those operations are done,” he said.

The massive increase in new laws passed by Labour has left police forces “awash with legislation”, he said. Many officers “poor or indifferent understanding of the law” meant that police were not providing the service they should to the public, Mr O’Connor added. He has called on Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, to issue a national code of practice to ensure all 43 police forces in England and Wales deal with protest in the same way.

Acpo's lead officer for uniformed operation, the chief constable of South Yorkshire, Meredydd Hughes, said O'Connor's report would "shape the future of national public order policing". "It represents the first time that British policing has examined modern protest in such a public way," Hughes said. "It will drive changes in our preparation for protest and our relationships with those involved."

A study from the Institute of Public Police Research found that detections per officer fell from 10.2 offences for each officer in 2003/04 to 9.4 offences per officer last year. Overall crime detection little improvement over the past decade showed little sign of improvement with just 28 per cent of recorded crimes “cleared up” in 2008/09 – little different from the 29 per cent detection rate in 1998/9, according to a new report. Detection rates varied enormously from force to force, the report also found.

SOURCE



Maybe it's time for men's lib

It's a dire time for the stronger sex. Men are in the firing line of sexism, too, so please stop the ‘dorking down’

The other morning, I made a speech at an awards function for the National Council for the Training of Journalists. In front of me were 83 of the brightest young journalism students in Britain. There were twice as many women as men. Afterwards, half a dozen came up, asked for my card and pitched their ideas. They were all girls too. The boys hovered, but were too shy or too slow.

Later in the publisher’s office where I work, I bumped into our finance director. She said, as she says several times a year: “WHEN, in God’s name, are you going to get on and produce some children, Mark?” On the way home, at Euston station, I noticed a bumper sticker in a newsagent. It read: Men are like carpet tiles. If you lay them right the first time, you can walk all over them for years.

Then I got a message from Times2. After an article on sexism by Janice Turner in the summer, the paper asked readers to write in and “expose casual sexism” for a new Babe Watch column. Interestingly, a substantial and growing number were from men quoting examples of outrageous chauvinism against them. So what did I think?

Let’s start with that speech. As far as the media business goes, it’s obvious that the game is up for young men. I’d also given a talk to young public relations executives a month before — there were two blokes in the entire audience. Men have been outqualified, outclassed and very comprehensively outnumbered by women. If nothing else, the glass ceiling will be shattered by sheer weight of numbers. We men are going to be a minority, and a small minority, in the newsrooms and boardrooms of the opinion-forming industries.

Then there was the finance director. Should I have complained to HR? Raising such a personal and, for all she knows highly sensitive, issue, in front of colleagues amounts, surely, to sexual harassment. (She used to compliment me on having a nice bum too. I don’t think she’s stopped for fear of HR. More’s the pity).

As for the newsagent at Euston — maybe I should have started a petition to stop shops selling this filthy sexist propaganda, at eye level, in front of impressionable children.

And then I could have worked myself up into a righteous wrath about male suicide rates, paternity leave, Abercrombie and Fitch billboards, domestic violence against men, Jo Brand, Fathers for Justice, prostate cancer awareness and the inexorable growth of a multibillion male cosmetics market, designed to make men feel old, inadequate and hopelessly insecure about their appearance.

But I’m not thinking these things. Faking it, like multitasking, must be another of those many things men aren’t very good at. Janice Turner writes with the bracing clarity of the true campaigner. I can’t fake the same kind of campaigning zeal for masculism — not least because I had to look it up.

To put it mildly, the male version of feminism has not got much traction in popular culture. You will find one or two male writers who do have that zeal. But they don’t speak for men. Most don’t know what masculism is either, and really don’t care.

So what do I really think? I think if female journalism students are brighter and more motivated than boys, so be it. I’m not going to call for quotas. If my finance director wants to tease me — I’ll treat it as harmless banter, more or less.

As for the bumper sticker — as a baby boomer who had to undergo involuntary attitude surgery as feminism took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, I still feel as if I’ve got about a thousand years of apologising to do. Silly bumper stickers and Jo Brand sketches are part of the community service we’re all serving.

Yet on the big issues — men’s health policy, parental access, legal equality — men do work themselves into a lather; and they are right to, because there are serious questions to be answered that just don’t get asked often enough.

I’m just as struck by what we might call instances of casual discrimination. One reader, Malcolm Lochhead, pointed out that it’s illegal for the Scouts to exclude girls, but not for the Guides to exclude boys. I’d be really interested to hear both organisations give their reasons for maintaining the anomaly; just as the main political parties should be asked why they aren’t challenging later retirement ages for men. What possible social, economic or biological justification can they find in 2009? Neil Collins , anothe reader, wrote in to ask why we have a Minister for Women and Equality. He is not alone. If Harriet Harman, the Secretary of State, genuinely believes in the “equality” side of her brief, perhaps she should immediately establish a Ministry for Men.

Then there is the casual sexism that shows up mainly in commercials. Men continue to have more spending power than women. But researchers in the ad agencies and marketing have known for years that it is women who have the biggest say in buying decisions, large and small.

Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts’ 2006 book Inside Her Pretty Little Head claimed that 80 per cent of purchasing decisions are made by women. They argued that marketing departments need to work much harder at understanding women’s motivations and decision-making systems.

They won the argument. This is a crude generalisation, but not one, I think, with which most ad agency planners will disagree. Creative briefs have radically changed to favour emotional intelligence and impact over rational, white-coated persuasion.

But there’s a sour side to the new kind of female-oriented marketing. In a new world where women make the decisions, men know their place: the stooge, the fallguy, the butt. I call it the dorking of men: look for a man in an ad and you find a dork.

But this hasn’t slipped past Times readers. These are some of the things they’ve spotted. Here’s an oven cleaner so easy to use that “even a man can do it”. Here’s a man being thrown out of a moving car because he’s so stupid he can’t buy the right ice cream; and another ejected from the house because the girl bought the right brand of period pain relief (“If only getting rid of all pains could be as fast . . .”) I’ve seen them too. Here’s a hopeless ex-boyfriend dragged along in the dirt by two smiling female joggers — can’t remember the brand, don’t especially want to. As our monitors remind us, just reverse the roles and imagine how far you’d get in an Advertising Standards Authority hearing.

I wonder what parents think is worse. Their girls are expected to aspire to be thin, gorgeous, sassy and rich. Their boys are expected to become scruffy losers whose pathetic existence is brightened up only by a pint of Carlsberg and their weekly fix of Nuts magazine.

As for Abercrombie & Fitch ads, David Beckham posters and Men’s Health covers — no, we don’t feel threatened. As long as Andrew Marr and Ray Mears get prime-time TV programmes and women say that they find them sexy, most of us feel that we will work with what we’ve got, with or without the six-packs and the perfect abs.

More HERE



Two thirds of voters say Immigration is bad for Britain

A poll released last night shows the two in three UK voters feel that immigration is bad for Britain. The survey, which looked at a range of policies regarding border control, revealed that 67 percent of voters feel that there was a negative effect on the UK from immigration. The majority of pollsters expressed concerns that immigration was resulting in foreign workers and illegal migrants taking jobs from British nationals, with calls for deportation high on the feedback.

Research company Angus Reid Public Opinion carried out the poll which once again shows that immigration will be a key issue in next year’s general election. The poll also revealed widespread scepticism over all of the main political parties’ immigration policies.

Labour was backed by just 12 percent of voters as the best political party to control British borders as opposed to the Tories which gathered 30 percent of the voting support. The Liberal Democrats were supported by just 8 percent.

The poll data comes just two weeks after Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his first major speech about the topic of immigration policy. In that speech Brown said the issue of immigration was not one for fringe parties and nor was it a taboo subject.

A spokesman for Angus Reid said the survey clearly shows how important the issue of immigration is right now within the UK, with numerous recent rule changes and open debates keeping the topic firmly in the limelight.

Over 2,000 people were quizzed in the survey, with 57 percent saying that deportation should be mandatory for all illegal newcomers. A further 56 percent were convinced that British workers were suffering from job losses to illegal immigrants. Only 23 percent of Britons said that illegal immigrants should be allowed temporary work in the UK and just 13 percent were in favour of them eventually having the opportunity to become citizens.

SOURCE



Record numbers leaving UK but half a million migrants still arriving each year

Many of those who left will have been Britons of high economic productivity seeking a better life -- and many who arrived will be unskilled. Only a Labour Party government would think that is a good deal. With less overcrowding and other migration-related problems in Britain, many of the Britons who went might well have stayed

A record number of people left the UK last year amid the recession - but the arrival of almost 700 foreign migrants a day meant the population still increased, according to new figures.

Eastern European workers returning home was behind the sharp rise in emigration but hundreds of thousands of new migrants continued to flock to the country. It meant, on balance, more people still arrived than left during 2008 and critics said the population remained on course to pass 70 million within two decades. Foreign migrants now account for a third of the population of London, the Office for National Statistics revealed.

The figures show that while the recession is having an impact the UK continues to be a major attraction for foreign workers and migrants, pushing the population up yet further. It will pile further pressure on local authorities and communities already facing a heavy strain on resources by large and sudden influxes of people.

And it came as a poll showed three quarters of the public are concerned about the impact immigration is having on Britain and a similar proportion do not believe the Government is open and honest about the scale.

A record 427,000 people left the country during 2008, around two thirds of whom had not been born in the UK, which was a 25 per cent increase on the 341,000 who left the previous year. However, at the same time, some 590,000 came to live in the UK in 2008, a rise of 16,000 on the previous year and just short of the record 596,000 arrivals in 2006. It meant a net immigration to the UK of 163,000, which was down by almost half on the previous year but still well above the 50,000 figure needed if the population is not to reach 70 million by 2029. Once Britons are removed from the figures, there was a net inflow of non-UK born migrants of 251,000 during the year – the equivalent of 688 foreign arrivals adding to the population every day.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said: "Ministers should apologise for the years in which they have given us a chaotic immigration system with numbers coming in at levels which put unacceptable pressure on public services. “To make the Points Based System effective in cutting immigration to sensible levels, we need to have an annual limit on the numbers coming here, as well as much more effective measures against those who abuse the loopholes in, for example, the student visa system.”

The rise in emigration was mainly driven by Eastern Europeans, 69,000 of who left last year compared to just 25,000 in 2007 but the former Eastern Bloc citizens, such as Poles and Slovaks, continue to arrive as well and there was a net inflow of 20,000 over the year. As for those leaving the UK, Poland was the most popular country of residence for foreign departees while Australia was top for British emigrants.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the think-tank Migrationwatch, said the fact it was EU citizens, who have free movement, who were the main drivers in the departures made a mockery of the Government's claims of controlling immigration. A YouGov poll for his organisation found 72 per cent of people want net migration cut to 50,000 a year. Sir Andrew said: "Today's immigration figures confirm that unless we change direction, immigration will add another seven million to our population in the next 25 years – that's equivalent to seven cities the size of Birmingham."

MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, who chair the cross party balanced migration group in Parliament said Government policies were having "little or no effect" on immigration. They said the 30% fall in net immigration was "almost entirely" due to Eastern European migrants. "These migrants are not affected by government immigration policies which appear to have had little or no effect on the overall scale of immigration," they said. "The time has come for all parties to stop ducking the issue and develop serious measures to reduce immigration to acceptable levels, not dish out yet more spoonfuls of spin."

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, said: "Our new flexible, points-based system gives us greater control over those coming to work or study from outside Europe, ensuring that only those that Britain need can come."

Separate Home Office statistics showed the number of people removed from the UK between July and September this year fell six per cent to 17,055.

SOURCE



It's not the emails ...

The computer files released by the CRU hacker are MUCH more damaging than the emails, damaging though those are. The computer code and coding notes reveal that the CRU data do NOT back up the CRU claims. One excerpt below with much more soon to come, I would think

In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

More HERE



Climategate: this is our Berlin Wall moment!

By James Delingpole

I’ve just had a great, very sympathetic interview about Climategate on LBC radio (London’s main commercial news and talk station) with Petrie Hosken. She told me she has been simply inundated with callers, all of them utterly unconvinced that human influence has made any significant on so-called “Global Warming”. She was desperate to get a few balancing calls from people who do believe in AGW but just couldn’t find any.

Can you imagine this happening a year ago? Or even a month ago? Until Climategate, we “Sceptics” were considered freaks – almost as bad as Holocaust deniers – beyond the pale of reasonable balanced discussion. Suddenly we’re the norm. Climategate has finally given us the chance to express openly what many of us secretly felt all along:

AGW is about raising taxes; increasing state control; about a few canny hucksters who’ve leapt on the bandwagon fleecing us rotten with their taxpayer subsidised windfarms and their carbon-trading; about the sour, anti-capitalist impulses of sandal-wearing vegans and lapsed Communists who loathe the idea of freedom and a functioning market economy.

We know it’s all a crock and we’re not going to take it. This is our Berlin Wall moment! They can’t stop us now!

SOURCE



Climategate: how they all squirmed

Among the many great amusements of the Climategate scandal are the myriad imaginative excuses being offered by the implicated scientists and their friends in the MSM as to why this isn’t a significant story. Here are some of the best. Most Unexpectedly Honourable Response: The Guardian’s eco-columnist George Monbiot. Say what you like about the Great Moonbat, the heliophobic Old Stoic is the ONLY member of the Climate-Fear-Promotion camp to have delivered a proper apology: "I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely."

Most brazen “doth protest too much” defence: www.realclimate.org. Real Climate is the website established and run by a claque of scientist friends of Michael Mann – inventor of the discredited Hockey Stick curve. They are also closely associated with the crowd at the disgraced Climate Research Unit. They clearly feel no apology is necessary: "More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."

Well, boys, if you say so…. Least convincing “The Dog Ate My Homework”excuse: Professor Phil ‘It was a typing error’ Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit. Many of the potentially incriminating Climategate emails were the work of CRU’s director Phil Jones, including the infamous one where he discussed “trick” to “hide the decline” in global temperatures. But it’s OK. As he tells his sympathetic audience at the Guardian it was a perfectly honest mistake: “The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste,”

Which does make you wonder how the sentence would have read had he just had a little longer to type it correctly. “Hiding the sausage?” “Heeding the decline?” “Playing a straight bat and keeping everything above board and scientifically scrupulous as we always do here at CRU”. Yes, that’ll be it – the last one. But you can see how easily the slip was made.

Most Disingenuous Cop-Out: Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. For years Andrew Revkin has been using the NYT – aka Pravda – to push the Al-Gore-approved AGW narrative so kindly embellished for him by likeminded scientist chums at parti pris institutions like CRU. But, like any decent reporter, Revkin is above all else a principled seeker-after-truth. That’s why he had absolutely no hesitation in furnishing NYT readers with every juicy detail of the biggest science scandal of the age. Or at least he would have done, had it not been for the following problem, expressed on his Dot Earth blog: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here."

Damn right, Andrew. Don’t you be troubling your readers with any of that “damning revelations” nonsense. If only journalists had shown similar integrity at Watergate, why, good old Richard Nixon might have stayed in power long enough to make America truly great.

Most Haughtily Dismissive “Nothing To See Here” Apologia: George Marshall. Here is George Marshall putting us right in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section: "Leaked email climate smear was a PR disaster for UEA. There was no evidence of conspiracy among climate scientists in the leaked emails – so why was the University of East Anglia’s response so pathetic?"

George who? Fortunately the great Bishop Hill has been doing some digging. According to the Guardian, “George Marshall is the founder and director of projects at the Climate Outreach and Information Network. He posts regularly to the blog climatedenial.org”. But as Bishop Hill has discovered it’s rather more sinister than that. This COIN charity has been funded to the tune of £700,000 over two years by DEFRA (US readers note: the dismal branch of the UK government responsible for murdering livestock, destroying agriculture, persecuting farmers etc) in order to: “profoundly change the attitude of rank and file union members; generating visible collective reduction action, establishing a social norm for personal action, and creating a persuasive synergy and cross over between personal action, work-placed programmes such as ‘Greening the workplace’, and the emissions reduction targets of employers.”

So not so much a case of Comment Is Free then. More a case of Comment Is Very Expensive If You’re A Taxpayer.

Most Ludicrously Biased Environment Correspondent, Even By The Ludicrously Biased Standards of Environment Correspondents: the BBC’s Roger Harrabin. When Harrabin (rather reluctantly one imagines) broke the Climategate story to BBC listeners a few days ago, guess where he turned for authoritative independent analysis of its significance. Yes, that’s right: to those completely unbiased scientists at Real Climate (above). They confirmed Harrabin’s suspicions that this wasn’t – as that “small minority” of pesky sceptics had been saying – a searing indictment of the AGW-promotion lobby’s dubious practices, but just a routine criminal break-in.

Now that he’s had a bit more time to digest the story, though, Harrabin has realised that the story is much, MUCH more important than that. Yes: it has much to tell us, he concludes, about the issue of data protection: "But this affair will surely change things: From now, scientific teams and peer-review groups will be much more cautious about how they word e-mails. Researchers at CRU complain that no one will want to do collaborative work if their private e-mail conversations may later be revealed. But many commercial corporate organisations at risk of hacking have developed ways of communicating that don’t leave them open to sabotage."

Thanks Roger. It’s thanks to responsible, studiedly neutral reporting like that that we’ve all come so fervently to trust the BBC.

SOURCE



British schools boss comes out fighting - for 'racist' Islamic schools

A trustee of one of the schools which Ed Balls is defending has written in a Hizb ut Tahrir journal condemning the "corrupt western concepts of materialism and freedom," observes Andrew Gilligan

We connoisseurs of Ed Balls, a small but happy band, know from experience that the moment he gets that complacent little smile playing round his lips is the time to set the video; the moment when Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families is once more about to walk, unknowingly, into an open manhole.

Mr Balls has been having good sport with the Tories this week. On Newsnight on Wednesday, the little smile was in full operation as he expressed mock sympathy with their communities spokesman, Paul Goodman, for having to defend the "factual errors" and "irresponsible politics" of his leader, David Cameron, in the row over Islamic schools. The Tories should have "checked their facts", he chided. Ofsted, he told Radio 4, "have satisfied themselves that there were not problems in these schools". The whole episode "casts real doubt on David Cameron's judgment", he said, sorrowfully.

Cameron had said that two schools run by members or activists of a thoroughly nasty extremist organisation, Hizb ut Tahrir, had been paid £113,000 of public money. The allegation came from a story of mine in the Telegraph four weeks ago. The central charge is perfectly true, thoroughly documented – and a scandal. But Cameron made some mistakes in the detail, sending the Westminster media chasing down one of their classic "process issue" cul-de-sacs (whether the schools were registered, and which particular part of the Whitehall cake this slice of cash had come from) and allowing Balls to launch his attack on Cameron. He clearly thought he'd scored a bullseye: one-nil to the forces of Gordon.

But it turns out to be Ed Balls, just as much as Cameron, who's been playing politics and failing to check the facts. The issue is not the situation with the schools now. It's the situation at the time the public money was paid. It turns out that the schools' chief Hizb ut Tahrir trustee, Yusra Hamilton, only resigned last month, in response to my story, long after the Government grant came in. The headteacher of one of the schools, Farah Ahmed, who remains a trustee to this day, refuses to deny that she was a Hizb member and has written in a Hizb journal condemning the "corrupt western concepts of materialism and freedom."

And Ofsted – far from "satisfying themselves that there were no problems" – actually condemned one of the two schools as "inadequate," questioned the suitability of the staff, and said that it could do more "to promote cultural tolerance and harmony." That was in November 2007.

By May 2008, according to a follow-up report, the school had been magically transformed, and was now "good". That second report, however, was written by an inspector with, at the very least, personal connections to Islamic groups.

I fear Mr Balls's heavy reliance on these Ofsted reports to defend the schools is about to make him look pretty silly. Ofsted is also, of course, the body that rated children's services in Haringey "good" – in the same year that the borough was comprehensively failing Baby P.

But there's a broader point. If taxpayer-funded schools were run by supporters of the BNP, there would be an outcry. Hizb ut Tahrir is an Islamic version of the BNP: not actually violent, but openly anti-Semitic, racist, and an enemy of liberal society. Do Ed Balls and New Labour really want to be the friends and defenders of such people? Does Balls really think it's good politics to be the Minister for Hizb ut Tahrir?

Not for the first time, the minister has allowed his thirst for a quick hit on the Tories to overcome his common sense. And not for the first time, he has scored a tactical victory, but dropped a massive strategic clanger.

SOURCE





27 November, 2009

British Meningitis victim wins £3.2m compensation after hospital turned him away for 'misusing emergency services'

Once again: "Diagnostic tests? Who needs 'em?"

The family of a man left severely brain damaged after being turned away from hospital were awarded £3.2million yesterday. Doctors failed to spot that a simple ear infection had spread to the brain of Mark Thomas when he was 12.

Antibiotics could have treated the illness, but they missed tell-tale signs of meningitis including a stiff neck and severe tiredness and sent him home. The blood test which flagged up the spread of the meningeal infection was only reviewed after Mr Thomas's parents took him back to the hospital the following week for a second opinion - by which time it had attacked his brain.

Before the eventual diagnosis, a nurse had lectured the family about ' inappropriate use of A&E services'.

Mr Thomas, now 20, has the mind of a child and virtually no short-term memory. He used to be a keen footballer, but now goes to fixtures and forgets the score within minutes of a match finishing. He suffered a stroke which damaged the right side of his body and will never be able to work, instead needing round-the-clock care from his parents Elaine, 49, and David, 51.

Mr Thomas, from Blakenhall, Walsall, suffered a series of ear infections which refused to clear up in the six weeks before contracting meningitis in February 2002. He saw his GP several times but by February 9 his condition deteriorated so much that his parents took him to Walsall Manor Hospital for a blood test. The schoolboy had the classic signs of meningitis, including a stiff neck, aversion to bright lights and extreme lethargy, which should have rung alarm bells for doctors. But he was sent home and the blood test results - which revealed the infection had spread to his brain - were not passed on to his parents.

Five days later his illness had worsened and his desperate parents took him back to A&E only to be told by a nurse his condition was not sufficiently serious and they were 'using emergency A&E servicesinappropriately'. But Mr and Mrs Thomas refused to take their son home and demanded a second opinion. It was only then that the blood test results from February 9 were reviewed and meningitis was finally diagnosed.

Bosses at Walsall NHS Hospital Trust admitted liability for the errors and a settlement was approved by the High Court in Birmingham yesterday. The £3.2million pay-out will fund a lifetime of future care for Mr Thomas.

Mrs Thomas, a housewife who cares full time for her son, said: 'My son had to learn to walk again, eat, it was just like having a baby again. If the doctors had done their job properly and acted more quickly, Mark would now be living a completely normal life.' Sue James, chief executive of the Trust, said: 'We wish to apologise again to Mark and deeply regret the delay in diagnosing his condition.'

SOURCE



Gifted Cambridge-bound student who died after two-year anorexia battle 'let down by NHS'

Anorexia is an OCD. She should have been given anti-psychotic drugs

A gifted teenager who died after suffering a severe eating disorder for two years was let down by health chiefs, an inquest heard today. Alice Rae, who scored 9 A*s in her GSCEs and had been offered a place at Cambridge University, was found dead in her bed by her mother on January 14. An inquest into the 18-year-old's death was told the 'highly intelligent and determined' college student was sent home from hospital within hours of her admission - and a chance to help her battle her condition was lost.

Her father, company director Peter Rae, told the coroner sitting at Winchester, Hants, that there were some occasions when his daughter 'simply ate and vomited all day every day.'

The inquest heard that just weeks before she died Alice, who suffered from anorexia and bulimia, had been admitted to hospital in December when her blood potassium levels were at life-threatening levels - she but was discharged within hours. The family turned to the NHS believing that experts would be able to help her out.

Mr Rae said: 'This was an obvious and clear point of possible intervention where the medical team saw that here was a girl with critically low life-threatening potassium levels. 'These were brought about by an illness and affecting behaviour. She was discharged in 20 hours and was given no advice other than to resume the treatment programme that clearly had not been working.' He added: 'We were told it would be quite some number of days (that she would be in there). We were surprised that she was discharged so quickly.'

Alice had repeatedly said she was unhappy with the treatment at the NHS Eastleigh Eating Disorder clinic and had made no progress in her recovery. He said that treatment at the Eastleigh clinic had been 'completely useless' in tackling her condition. She would gorge on meals and throw them straight back up - and at her weakest was able to walk no more than 50 yards.

Mr Rae added: '(Staff at) the meetings would usually ask 'have you vomited this week?' and she saw this as how they were failing to understand her condition.' Mr Rae said that his daughter was overcome by her condition and unable to help herself.

Alice was a keen debater and horserider who had two older brothers - William and Tom - and a younger sister Georgina. However, she had battled with the eating disorder since 2006, the inquest was told.

Dr Carol Ward, the GP who saw Alice in the weeks leading up to her death, said that her condition had improved after her hospital admission - but that she was a very ill young woman. 'She was extremely bright and extremely intelligent and could discuss her care in great detail but this is a condition that is so devastating that it does affect your ability to make decisions about your care,' she said. 'Young girls with this condition are very, very difficult to help.'

She added that she expected Alice to be kept in hospital longer following her December 29 admission. 'I was surprised she was discharged as early - I did ring late morning (on December 30) and speak to medical admissions and there were no plans for her discharge,' she said.

A post mortem examination on Alice's body revealed no obvious cause of death - but it was ruled that on the balance of probabilities, low potassium levels were the most likely factor.

Dr Neil Joughin, a private consultant psychiatrist based in Chichester, West Sussex, saw Alice in the days before her death - and said she had a new motivation to get better after winning a university place. He said: 'If Alice had gone back into a general hospital or been sent to an eating disorder unit she would likely be alive today.'

She did not tell him about her hospital admission - and he would have treated her differently if she realised her problems.

Low potassium levels can cause the heart to beat irregularly - and doctors at the Royal County Hospital had suggested fitting a pacemaker in the hours before her hasty discharge. She was seen at the Eastleigh clinic by treatment co-ordinator Dr Isabel Lewsey for seven months of cognitive behavioural therapy at the start of 2008 - before it was discontinued because it was not working.

Coroner Sarah Whitby, the Assistant Deputy Coroner for Hampshire, recorded a narrative verdict. She ruled: 'Alice Rae died from an unascertained cause on the night of the 13 to 14 of January 2009 at her home. 'She had been suffering from anorexia from at least May 2006 for which she had been receiving treatment.'

SOURCE



British man jailed and sent to loony bin for refusing to talk to police

No 5th Amendment protection in Britain

The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record. His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.

The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.

In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007. JFL told The Register he had scrambled the data on several devices as part of security measures for his business, a small software company.

He was arrested on 15 September 2008 by officers from the Metropolitan Police's elite Counter-Terrorism Command (CTC), when entering the UK from France. Sniffer dogs at Gare du Nord in Paris detected his Estes model rocket, which was still in its packaging and did not have an engine.

On arrival at St Pancras, JFL was detained under the Terrorism Act and taken to Paddington Green police station, a highly secure facility where UK police hold their most dangerous suspects.

He was returning to the UK for an appointment with customs officials, to surrender after a missed bail appearance. This separate customs investigation - since dropped without charges - surrounded a failed attempt to enter Canada, and JFL missed bail following a move to the Netherlands. This contact with British authorities was apparently part of CTC's decision to arrest JFL.

While interviewing him, CTC, the unit that in 2006 replaced Special Branch as the UK's national counter-terror police, also seized more luggage. JFL had sent packages separately via Fedex to the Camden Lock Holiday Inn, where he had booked a room.

Throughout several hours of questioning, JFL maintained silence. With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence - a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.

A full forensic examination found nine nanograms of the high explosive RDX on his left hand, but JFL was given police bail. His passport was seized, however.

JFL says he does not know how the RDX, which has has military and civil applications, came to be on his hand. A result of five nanograms or less is routinely discounted by forensics and no charges were ever brought over his result of nine nanograms.

He returned to Paddington Green station as appointed on 2 December, and was re-arrested for carrying a pocket knife. During the interview CTC officers told JFL they wanted to examine the encrypted contents of the several hard drives and USB thumb drives they had seized from his Fedex packages.

Much more HERE



More Monbiot: Still shaken but not stirred

Monbiot has made his mark by shrieking louder than most about climate change so he can't back down now but he is smart enough to see that the hacked CRU materials cannot be ignored -- which is what most Warmists are trying to do

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief. Jones knew that any incorrect papers by sceptical scientists would be picked up and amplified by climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, who often – as I documented in my book Heat – use all sorts of dirty tricks to advance their cause.

Even so, his message looks awful. It gives the impression of confirming a potent meme circulated by those who campaign against taking action on climate change: that the IPCC process is biased. However good the detailed explanations may be, most people aren't going to follow or understand them. Jones's statement, on the other hand, is stark and easy to grasp.

In this case you could argue that technically he has done nothing wrong. But a fat lot of good that will do. Think of the MPs' expenses scandal: complaints about stolen data, denials and huffy responses achieved nothing at all. Most of the MPs could demonstrate that technically they were innocent: their expenses had been approved by the Commons office. It didn't change public perceptions one jot. The only responses that have helped to restore public trust in Parliament are humility, openness and promises of reform.

When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit. Otherwise, like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, he will linger on until his remaining credibility vanishes, inflicting continuing damage to climate science.

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.

The crisis has been exacerbated by the university's handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond. RealClimate reports that "We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day." In other words, the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike.

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU's opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped "no comment" and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean "guilty as charged". When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called "WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999". Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.

By then he should have been touring the TV studios for the past 36 hours, confronting his critics, making his case and apologising for his mistakes. Instead, he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Now, far too late, he has given an interview to the Press Association, which has done nothing to change the story.

The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they're up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.

The greatest tragedy here is that despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad. By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow. Hoggan and Littlemore have shown how fossil fuel industries have employed "experts" to lie, cheat and manipulate on their behalf. The revelations in their book (as well as in Heat and in Ross Gelbspan's book The Heat Is On) are 100 times graver than anything contained in these emails.

But the deniers' campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists. Far from it: it means that they must distinguish themselves from their opponents in every way. No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.

SOURCE



Pathetic British Conservative Party leader

We read:

"Two years ago he derided politically-correct Christmas cards which do not mention the word Christmas as 'insulting tosh'. But last night David Cameron was facing a backlash from his own party after it emerged the Conservative official cards have the message 'Season's Greetings'.

The Christmas cards, which are available on the party's website, avoid all religious imagery - preferring generic winter scenes and pictures of robins to pictures of Jesus and the Three Kings. And the word Christmas does not appear on them at all.

Yesterday, Tory back-benchers were furious with indications that their party is becoming so politically correct. Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, said: 'If this decision has been made on a PC basis it would be totally unacceptable and I would be extremely saddened. 'This kind of pandering to extreme elements of the PC brigade is not something I would envisage from the Conservative Party. I have yet to meet anyone of any religion who is offended by people in this country celebrating Christmas.

Source

26 November, 2009

British straight couple refused civil partnership because they're not homosexuals

A straight British couple who reject marriage but want to seal their love with a civil partnership were told on Tuesday they could not because they are not gay. Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle, both 25-year-old civil servants, were turned away from Islington Registry Office in north London because the law says civil partnerships are only for same-sex couples.

Undeterred, the couple said they will take their fight for equality to court. "We want to secure official status for our relationship in a way that supports the call for complete equality and is free of the negative connotations of marriage," Freeman said. "If we cannot have a civil partnership, we will not get married."

A spokesman for Islington Council said: "The law dictates that a civil partnership is only for couples of the same sex. The council must follow the law."

There are a small number of differences between a marriage and a civil partnership, including that a marriage can be conducted in a church, while a civil partnership cannot.

SOURCE



George Monbiot (the original moonbat) is shaken, not stirred:

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence of attempts to prevent scientific data from being made public.

Worse, some suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by sceptics, or to keep it out of a Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The head of the unit, Phil Jones, should resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

But do these revelations justify the sceptics' claims that this is "the final nail in the coffin" of global warming theory? Not at all. They damage the credibility of three or four scientists. They raise questions about the integrity of one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence. To bury man-made climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed.

More HERE (Sarcasm follows the excerpt above. Is that the best he can do? No alternative evidence offered for his beliefs??)



Third of new mothers left alone after birth by over-stretched midwives in Britain

More than one in three mothers are left alone and worried during labour or shortly after giving birth, a poll shows today. Almost a third received no free antenatal classes on the NHS, while a quarter had very little help with breastfeeding despite it being a Government priority.

Critics say the Health Service is struggling to cope with a massive shortage of midwives because officials failed to foresee huge rises in birth rates.

Sushma Cherion, 37, said she was left alone in a delivery room for two hours after giving birth for the first time. Mrs Cherion, of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, gave birth to Leia-Rose, who is now two, at King George Goodmayes Hospital in Essex. The software test engineer, who is married to Gilles, 39, said: 'When I was transferred to a ward, I was not seen by a midwife until eight hours later. 'There were no midwives on the ward and I was not greeted by anyone. I was a first-time mum and did not know that I was supposed to wake up and feed my baby.

'There was no guidance from midwives about breastfeeding. 'I wanted my soiled sheets changed but I couldn't and started crying, so I ended up changing them myself.'

The Royal College of Midwives says there is a shortage of at least 5,000 midwives. It commissioned the survey of more than 3,500 women visiting the Netmums website, which found that 35 per cent of new mothers say they were left alone during labour or just after, at a time when they felt worried.

Sally Russell, of Netmums.com, said: 'This survey's results should demonstrate to the Government just how stretched maternity services are. 'Some mums have told us that the lack of postnatal care has led them to suffer with postnatal depression, which can have dramatic impacts on the whole family.'

SOURCE



Socialist Britain too poor to afford cancer research?

If they fired just one percent of their bureaucrats, they would have a mint to spend on research

Research into cancer and dementia will come under threat from government plans to fund social care, experts warned last night. Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, told The Times that millions of pounds would be “reprioritised” from health research and development to pay the costs of the Social Care Bill, published today. Money will also be diverted from public health campaigns such as those on swine flu, sexually transmitted diseases and obesity.

The Bill, a key plank of Gordon Brown’s pre-election legislative agenda, has been condemned by Labour peers, scientists and health campaigners. It would guarantee free care at home or other support for up to 400,000 elderly and disabled people from next October, at a cost of £670 million a year.

Mr Burnham, disclosing for the first time how he planned to pay for the proposal, said that £60 million would be diverted from the health service’s research and development (R&D) budget and £50 million from public health promotions. Cutting spending on management consultants in the NHS would provide £60 million.

Further funds will be sought as part of a “major productivity drive”, he said. The NHS is expected to make up to £20 billion in efficiency savings over the next four years. Hospitals could see their income tied to levels of patient satisfaction on matters such as the quality of maternity care.

Scientists warned of the consequences of cutting research budgets, which help to support the clinical trials of new medicines. Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said: “This is extremely disturbing as the NHS budget was supposed to be ringfenced to protect long-term investment into the health needs of this country. In any department any raid on the R&D budget is supposed to be discussed first with the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. If they’ve breached this process it’s an extremely worrying development that needs to be looked into.”

Health ministers are expected to be interrogated in detail about which elements of the R&D budget should be cut to pay for social care as part of a continuing inquiry by the Lords Science and Technology Committee. Lord Warner of Brockley, the Labour peer and former Health Minister who last week described the social care proposals as “totally misjudged”, said: “I will be looking at the Bill very carefully to see if my worst fears are confirmed and whether the figures really do add up.”

Mr Burnham defended the Bill from claims that it amounted to “an admiral firing an Exocet into his own flagship”. He denied that any cuts would affect patient care or compromise major research projects. “I’m not saying [the Social Care Bill] is perfect, but in the interim it makes the system a bit fairer now,” he said.

Asked to account for the reallocation of funds, he said: “It’s always a question of priorities. I’m not cutting into vital projects. I’m moving stuff out of lower-priority, backroom spend towards direct public benefit. All I want to say is we are being tough about that. I’m interested in really squeezing so that we get as much benefit directly to the public as quickly as we can. “I’ve got to be ruthless about that and I will be ruthless about that. We will spell it out when the Bill comes to Parliament.” He added: “I don’t think anyone can accuse us of underfunding R&D.”

The NHS research budget for 2010-11 is more than £1 billion. It funds a multitude of projects ranging from the diagnosis of brain tumours in children to reasons why patients’ immune systems are lowered after kidney transplants. Academics and research scientists expressed concern that funding to find cures for conditions such as cancer or Alzheimer’s disease could be hampered in the case of longer-term cuts to training and research.

Peter Dangerfield, co-chair of the BMA medical academic staff committee, said that budget cuts were already becoming commonplace in medical schools and that in some cases research and teaching posts were not being filled as staff retired. “There are worries and concerns here,” he said. “Research, training and education budgets are usually the among the first to go when the health service is asked to make savings. We do fear that patients could suffer quite a hard hit in the long term, missing the benefits of new medicines and expertise.”

Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said: “The NHS research and development budget funds vital infrastructure that supports cancer clinical trials. These trials have been instrumental in driving the improvements in cancer outcomes we have seen over the past 20 or 30 years. We would be very concerned to see cuts that affected these budgets given that they are an integral part of improving health outcomes for patients. This government investment ultimately benefits everyone.”

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said that Labour’s sums did not add up. “The amount of money they are cutting from the NHS budget doesn’t even begin to cover what they claim the cost of the policy will be, which most experts agree is already a gross underestimate.

Anna Dixon, director of policy at the King’s Fund, said: “Ministers should think hard about the likely impact of reducing budgets for research and development at a time when we are asking the NHS to step up and find projects and solutions to make efficiency savings. The suggestions in the Social Care Bill are rather short-term and what we need is a more substantial and long-term solution to social care funding that will be accessible to everyone who needs it.”

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman said: “The Government’s plans are so vague as to be incredible. It’s fantasy politics and the full costing of this has to be revealed.”

SOURCE



School leavers are not fit for work, says British retail chief

Millions of school and college leavers are 'not fit for work', the boss of Marks & Spencer warned yesterday. Chairman Sir Stuart Rose said too many didn't even have a basic grasp of the three Rs. His company is one of the country's biggest employers, with a 65,000-strong regular workforce as well as 20,000 Christmas temps. It comes weeks after Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy called the education system 'woeful' and said employers were too often 'left to pick up the pieces.'

In an outspoken attack in London yesterday, Sir Stuart, 60, said: 'They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.' He said his work as chairman of the Business in the Community charity had highlighted the skills crisis. A major poll by the charity of around 2,000 business leaders over 18 months found the education black hole was their second biggest headache after the recession. Many young people simply do not have the ' employability', lacking skills from reading and writing to punctuality, presentation and communication, it found.

Yesterday business lobby groups also weighed in. Stephen Alambritis, from the Federation of Small Businesses, said many bosses spend 'two to four weeks' helping to educate young people when they join the firm. This is before they can start teaching them about the job they have been hired to do.

Phil Orford, chief executive of the Forum of Private Business, added: 'There is a clear gap between what businesses need and what businesses get when it comes to the ability of the education system to produce viable employees for small businesses.' Around 750,000 small firms have been forced to hire recruits 'with fewer skills than they had hoped for', according to its latest research. About one in five ranked the skills in the workforce as 'poor' or 'very poor'.

Appearing alongside Sir Stuart during a question and answer session at the Confederation of British Industry's annual conference yesterday was Chris Hyman, chief executive of the services giant Serco. He added that Britain suffers from a 'paranoia about qualifications, rather than skills.'

Recent figures show that nearly one in five pupils - 19 per cent - finished 11 years of compulsory education without achieving a single C grade in any subject.

There is also a widening gulf between private and state schools, with many parents feeling forced into paying to educate their children.

And the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics revealed that there are nearly one million young people aged 16 to 24 who cannot get a job. A record 19.8 per cent of young people are unemployed, which means they are actively looking for work but are having no success.

Sir Stuart was educated in Tanzania followed by a Quaker school in York before starting his career in 1971 as an M&S trainee.

Last night Schools Minister Iain Wright hit back at his claims, saying: 'Employers rightly have higher expectations of workers because there are fewer low-skill jobs in the economy - but it's unfair and wrong to make sweeping generalisations that distort the true picture. 'Our school leavers work hard for their qualifications and are better equipped for the world of work than they have ever been - with English and maths results at their highest ever levels [according to dumbed-down tests] and the consistency of those standards rigorously scrutinised by our independent exam regulator.'

SOURCE



A lesson in incompetence: How 1 in 3 British schools fails to provide adequate teaching

More than two million children are being taught in schools that are mediocre or failing, inspectors said yesterday. A 'stubborn core' of incompetent teachers is holding pupils back and fuelling indiscipline and truancy, Ofsted warned. Despite a raft of national initiatives, a third of schools still fail to offer a good education. The watchdog said the life chances of too many children were limited because they left school without basic mastery of the three Rs.

The withering verdict, which came in Ofsted's last annual report to Parliament before next year's general election, will be seen as an indictment of Labour's 12 years in power. 'Across the range of Ofsted's remit, there remains too much that is mediocre and persistently so,' said Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector. Her report warned that many pupils were being failed by teaching that is dull and confused and leads to disruption and absenteeism. Some 2.3million pupils were being let down.

Inspectors found that nearly half of academy schools - set up by Labour to raise standards through private sponsorship - were failing to provide a good education.

And a separate inquiry has found that ministers have wasted £5billion running education classes for adults in factories and offices.

Launching her report on the state of education in 2008/09, Miss Gilbert hailed improvements over the previous year but warned that progress has been too slow. She reserved some of her harshest criticism for poor teaching, warning that in some schools, pupils are being held back by their teachers' poor grasp of maths and science.

In science, children are being turned off the subject by lessons that are routine or paper-based. In English, some teachers are failing to extend children's vocabularies or encourage them to develop writing skills. Some trainee teachers leave college without understanding the importance of traditional 'phonics' reading techniques.

The report goes on to warn that the impact of millions of pounds being spent on computers in the classroom was being 'diminished' because the technology was too often used in pedestrian ways. 'There is a stubborn core of inadequate teaching and teaching that is only satisfactory - teaching that fails to inspire, challenge or extend children and learners,' Miss Gilbert said. 'If children are not taught well, they will not rise above low expectations.'

She revealed that substandard teachers face a crackdown under a revamped inspection regime that will see a doubling in the number of lessons observed by inspectors. 'The new inspection framework focuses more sharply on this issue,' she said. Children are more likely to play truant in schools where teaching is weak, her report added.

Pupils are also less likely to lose concentration and disrupt lessons if teaching is lively and engaging. 'As in the case of attendance, standards of behaviour are linked with the quality of teaching,' the report said. 'Improvements in behaviour are brought about through strengthening the quality of teaching.'

A hard core of more than 30 secondary schools is battling serious discipline problems, the report added.

Meanwhile one in five secondaries is struggling to get a grip on persistent low-level disruption which has a direct impact on the education of other children in the class. 'The challenge now is to get more teachers to teach consistently well and, in particular, to reduce the variation in teaching within providers and to tackle the teaching that is dull, lacking in challenge and failing to engage learners,' the report said.

Teaching in 2 per cent of schools - about 400 - was rated 'inadequate'. It was merely satisfactory in a further 28 per cent.

Miss Gilbert went on to lend weight to complaints from a string of business leaders that youngsters are leaving school without the basic skills they need in the workplace. The most recent intervention came from Sir Stuart Rose, the chairman of Marks & Spencer, who said this week: 'They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.' Miss Gilbert appeared to agree, saying: 'Too many young people leave school without adequate basic skills and this can have a limiting effect on their whole lives.' Problems begin at primary school, her report warned. Nearly 30 per cent of 11-year-olds fail to reach basic standards in both English and maths, she said.

Ministers want to scrap the national literacy and numeracy hours without putting in place a proper replacement system, she warned. Her fourth annual report was published as Ofsted fights for survival amid an unprecedented crisis of confidence over its own effectiveness. The watchdog found itself disastrously exposed over its role in the Baby P scandal and is coming under growing criticism from local authorities, schools and MPs.

Delivering her report at Ofsted's headquarters in London, Miss Gilbert said she would not be cowed by vested interests. Her report concluded that, overall, 32 per cent of schools are failing to give children a good education. Just 19 per cent are outstanding, while 50 per cent are rated good. Some schools inspected last year had declined in quality since their previous inspection three years before. One in five schools previously given a good or outstanding rating have slumped to merely ' satisfactory' or even 'inadequate'.

The report drew a furious response from teachers. Martin Freedman, head of pay, conditions and pensions at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: 'This attempt to scapegoat teachers who, the report says, are doing a good job even in sometimes challenging circumstances, smacks of political expediency. 'Quite why Ofsted thinks insulting and demoralising those working in education is the best way to improve young people's education is puzzling.'

But Nick Gibb, Tory schools spokesman, said: 'There are still far too many children being let down by the quality of education on offer.'

Schools Minister Vernon Coaker said: 'We want every school to be a good school and we are clearly heading in that direction.'

The Ofsted report also revealed that thousands of children are at risk from inadequate nurseries and childminders. Weaknesses at substandard providers included a failure to check that staff were suitable to work with children. Five per cent of nurseries and childminders inspected in 2008/09 were judged to be inadequate - no improvement on last year. But Ofsted said the large majority of early education and childcare providers offered a good service, and parents should be reassured.

SOURCE





25 November, 2009

Leftist British PM accused of bowing to unions by freezing private companies out of NHS

Gordon Brown is facing a damaging rift with his party after slowing the pace of reform in the NHS, The Times has learnt. Private companies and charities are being frozen out of the NHS, prompting accusations that the Government has bowed to pressure from the unions. Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, is facing a Cabinet backlash, criticism from the former ministers John Hutton and Alan Milburn and attacks from the CBI and charity groups over proposals to limit outside involvement in the NHS.

The Department of Health will publish new guidelines shortly that limit private companies and charities to providing services not already offered or in areas where the existing NHS is failing. A draft obtained by The Times says: “Only if there was insufficient improvement within a reasonable timescale and the scale of under-performance was significant would the PCT [primary care trust] consider engaging with other potential providers or other solutions (eg, franchising).”

This is regarded as a dramatic shift from the policy set out by Alan Johnson when he was Health Secretary. His document, Necessity Not Nicety, suggested that primary care trusts should become more competitive and commercial, but Mr Burnham is understood to think that this unsettled the health service.

Mr Burnham’s change is regarded as a political manoeuvre, with both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats pledging to make it easier for outside organisations to provide work for the NHS. Civil servants have said privately that sections in the new guidelines referring to the NHS as the “preferred provider” have been pre-negotiated with unions and should be regarded as untouchable. Some NHS trusts are not waiting for the new guidance, though, and are already abandoning plans to use outside providers.

The move has caused tensions at Cabinet level, prompting a disagreement in one Cabinet sub-committee during which Mr Burnham was accused of going back on new Labour’s modernising agenda. Blairites suggest that attempts to “buy off” Unison and Unite, which together provided £6.6 million to Labour — around 30 per cent of its income — in the year to June, are damaging the party.

Documents uncovered by Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, suggest that Mr Burnham has met union representatives more than any other group since he became Health Secretary in June. The Department of Health is refusing to release the notes of one meeting that took place September, claiming that they are subject to “Chatham House” rules that secure anonymity. In a letter to Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary, Mr Burnham appeared to acknowledge that TUC staff were involved in helping to draw up the policy by thanking them for their work.

“This is a perfect illustration of the corrupting influence of big money in politics,” Mr Lamb told The Times. “This move will undermine the efforts to improve efficiency and productivity in the NHS.”

Representatives of the NHS Confederation, CBI and Acevo, which represents charities, are still battling to water down the guidelines before publication, asking why the outside groups should only be be approached when the NHS has failed.

Stephen Bubb, chief executive of Acevo, said: “This is a clear breach of the Government’s manifesto promise that the third sector will be treated as an ‘equal partner’ in providing services.” Susan Anderson, CBI director of public services, said: “These are more designed to assuage the demands of trade unions than to meet the needs of patients.”

There is also tension within Labour, with concerns expressed by at least two Cabinet ministers and pressure on Lord Mandelson to overturn the shift on the grounds that it might break government competition guidelines and EU competition law.

Mr Hutton told The Times: “I would be concerned about any policy that turned the clock back because you can’t.” Mr Milburn has already attacked the plans, saying: “There should be no preferred provider. Quality should be the only yardstick, not the type of provider.”

Two former government advisers, professors Julian Le Grand and Paul Corrigan, have also criticised the move.

A spokeswoman for Mr Burnham denied that they were bowing to pressure from the unions. “When services are performing well, and we’ve invested a lot of money in them, why would you pull the rug from under the NHS and put services out to tender?”

She strongly denied any accusation that the party was doing the bidding of the unions, and said that the new rules could mean that outside providers received more work from the NHS rather than less. “We are not bound by either the unions or outside groups and we want to have a good relationship with all of them.”

SOURCE



Another cancer drug too dear for Britain: Bowel cancer victims denied life-prolonging care that's free in Europe

Bowel cancer sufferers are to be denied a life-prolonging drug on the NHS which is available to patients across Europe and beyond. Trials show Avastin can extend life by almost two years. But the Government's rationing body, Nice, says it is not cost-effective.

In what has been dubbed 'passport prescribing', Britain does not allow routine use of the drug while patients in virtually all other EU countries get the drug paid for. France, Germany, Italy and Scandinavian nations, as well as Australia and Canada, all meet the cost of treatment.

Around 35,000 Britons develop bowel cancer each year, of which 4,000-5,000 with advanced cancer could benefit from the drug. Avastin, also known as bevacizumab, costs around £18,000 for a course of ten months' treatment given as intravenous infusion with chemotherapy. The price is similar to that in other countries.

But the complex formula used by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which looks at quality of life and overall cost effectiveness, says the annual cost is £36,000. This breaks the maximum limit set by Nice of £30,000 - a figure which has not changed in ten years despite inflation.

Although the manufacturer Roche devised a subsidy scheme to reduce an original Nice estimate from £62,000 in an attempt to get it approved, this was not good enough. Nice's decision, which is preliminary, puts Britain in the same category as Latvia, Poland, Albania and Macedonia in not paying for sufferers to use the drug.

Last night patient groups and experts voiced their dismay. Kate Spall, of the Pamela Northcott Fund, which assists cancer patients denied new therapies, said: 'This is another bad day for cancer patients and another good day for accountants.'

Professor Will Steward, of the Department of Cancer Studies and Molecular Medicine at Leicester University, also said he was disappointed. 'Having Avastin would bring new hope to the many patients for whom this offers a proven increased chance of living longer with a better quality of life,' he said.

Dr Rob Glynne Jones, chief medical adviser of the Bowel Cancer UK charity, called for Nice, the manufacturer and the Department of Health to find a compromise that would allow the drug to be used. 'The clinical efficacy of bevacizumab and its benefit to patients with metastatic colorectal cancer is well proven,' he said.

Patients waiting for a decision on Avastin are forced to plead for special funding from local health bodies or hope that a trial of the drug is running in their area.

Nice, which has been accused of spending more on spin than on evaluating drugs, has often been criticised for banning drugs from NHS use as too expensive. Last week it decided to reject NHS use of the liver cancer drug Nexavar, which gives patients six months' extra life. The decision is being appealed.

It contrasts with the fast-tracking of the breast cancer drug Herceptin after pressure from patients and the intervention of the then Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. Ironically, Avastin also treats breast cancer but its use on the NHS is in limbo until the bowel cancer issue is settled.

Last year Professor Mike Richards, the National Cancer Director, called for greater flexibility between Nice and the pharmaceutical industry to make more treatments available to cancer patients.

Bowel cancer patient Barbara Moss, 54, from Worcester, spoke at a Nice review last month about how Avastin had transformed her quality of life. She was given just five months to live when diagnosed with bowel cancer in November 2006, but is convinced the drug has kept her alive and in remission. She fought to get back from the NHS almost £14,000 sent on ancillary care, but had to pay £9,000 for the drug itself. Yesterday she called on Nice to find a way to approve the use of the drug 'so that thousands can benefit from the drug like I did while avoiding financial hardship'.

Avastin works by blocking the blood supply to the tumour, starving it of oxygen and nutrients. Once it has shrunk it can be surgically removed.

Dr Carole Longson, director of the health technology evaluation centre at Nice, said its decision was preliminary. While it recognised that the drug 'may provide benefits in terms of clinical effectiveness', it concluded that 'the high cost of bevacizumab relative to the benefits it brings means that it is not a cost-effective use of NHS resources'.

SOURCE



British woman saw seven different government doctors but not ONE spotted her brain tumour

Diagnostic tests? Forget it! Sprinkle lavender oil on your pillow, she was told. She was even seen by a specialist but still no scan

When Nicole Witts complained to her GP about excruciating headaches she was told it was sinusitis. When, four months later, she asked why her arms were going into spasm she was told she probably had a trapped nerve. Over the course of five months, Nicole, 37, a mother of two, saw eight different doctors who came up with a range of diagnoses - including post-natal depression - but all of them failed to spot the truth: Nicole had a brain tumour.

By the time it was detected, in February 2008, the tumour was the size of an orange. Even then, doctors picked it up only because Nicole had had a massive fit and was rushed to hospital by ambulance. A brain scan revealed the tumour over her left ear.

'When the doctor told me what they'd found, I thought: "Oh God, I'm going to die",' recalls Nicole. 'I am not normally religious, but over the next few days I spent most of my time, when not in bed, in the hospital chapel. 'I was so frightened - not for me, but for my kids, wondering how they would cope without their mum.' Her daughters Megan and Ellen were then only four and eight months old

'I had suspected for some months there was something wrong with me, but the way the various doctors had repeatedly dismissed me had left me wondering if I was going mad. 'Yet despite the awful news, I was relieved to know that I hadn't been imagining it all.'

With brain tumours, early diagnosis can be a matter of life and death. Around 16,000 people in the UK develop a primary brain tumour each year and around 3,500 people die as a result, often because the tumour is detected too late for it to be treated effectively.

Many of these are not cancerous - which can spread elsewhere; instead, they are benign growths that have formed around vital areas of the brain. But though 'benign', these growths can cause irreparable damage to blood vessels, causing bleeding in the brain, or a build-up of fluid, or exert pressure on vital parts that control nerves and signals.

No one knows what causes primary brain tumours. The symptoms vary according the tumour's location. Although persistent headaches are the most well known - and the symptom that frightens patients most - they occur only in one in three cases. Nausea, balance problems, weakness in the limbs, pins and needles and concentration problems are among other possible symptoms. Tumours can also cause disturbance to vision, and are sometimes detected by opticians.

One of the most common symptoms is a fit, as in Nicole's case. This occurs when the tumour applies pressure to sensitive areas of the brain, interrupting the electrical and chemical messages that pass between the brain cells.

Nicole believes hers would have been diagnosed more quickly if she had consistently seen the same GP during her visits. But she belongs to a large surgery with nine doctors, of whom she saw seven. She also saw a hospital ear, nose and throat specialist. 'Each doctor I saw had a different theory about what was wrong with me. The range of possibilities they came up with was amazing. 'If we still had the old fashioned practice, where you see only your own GP, I think my tumour would have been picked up sooner.'

Nicole's experience is quite common. 'We get a lot of calls about this,' says Moira Dennison from Brain Tumour UK. 'This lack of continuity of care means tumours aren't picked up until later than they should be. 'People see one GP and then another and then another and no one is putting all the information together that points to a brain tumour.'

It's the system that is at fault, says Dr Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, not GP training. He explains that it's designed so 'patients can quickly get to see a doctor', but this creates problems with lack of continuity of care. 'If, as a doctor, you see a patient repeatedly you build up a rapport with someone and get to know them. Then, you would most probably pick up a problem earlier than if you saw someone on a one-off basis. 'My advice is that if you have something persistent you should wait to see the doctor you saw before.

He adds: 'Headaches are far more common than brain tumours and, if anything, doctors over-diagnose the possibility of brain tumours and so a lot of people who don't have a brain tumour are referred for investigation.' However, this was not the case for Nicole - indeed, at one point a GP laughed about her symptoms when she tried to make an appointment.

Nicole, from Leighton Buzzard, Beds, first went to see the doctor in August 2007 when she found her hearing had become muffled and she was hearing whirring noises in her head. 'I didn't have a clue what was causing it, but when I saw the doctor I tapped the side of my head where I now know the tumour was growing and said: "It feels as if there is something in there",' Nicole says. 'However, the doctor thought it was sinusitis and gave me a nasal spray. I didn't think it sounded right - I didn't even have a runny nose. 'I used the spray for two weeks with no joy, so another doctor referred me to hospital because my hearing was still muffled.

'I was seen by an ear, nose and throat specialist who thought I had an infection that had caused a build-up of fluid behind the ear - and suggested I have an operation to have a grommet (a small plastic tube) to drain the fluid. 'I had that done and it did partially improve the muffled sensation, though no one is sure why.

'However, by the autumn I began to get headaches which were so severe I could hardly put my ear on the pillow at night. They were crippling. Later, I found out this was because the tumour was putting undue pressure on certain areas. 'However, when I went back to the surgery - and saw yet another GP - he thought it was maybe due to stress and suggested I try sprinkling lavender oil on my pillow to help. 'Looking back, it is laughable, but we are programmed to accept what doctors tell us and so I did.' ....

Nicole needed major surgery to remove the tumour and had to be transferred to the Royal Free Hospital in North London. 'The surgeon told me the tumour was almost certainly benign, but it was huge and would need a nine-hour operation to remove it,' says Nicole. 'I was relieved it wasn't cancerous, but I was still really worried. 'He told me if I didn't have it removed then I would be dead within six months - because although it was benign, it would cut off the blood supply or cause bleeding. The surgery had a one per cent risk of death and a five per cent risk of paralysis, but I knew there was no alternative.'

Nicole had the operation on March 14 last year. 'The surgeon came to see me afterwards and he was really excited because he had managed to get all the tumour out. 'It was a huge relief. Gary was there and I instantly recognised him. He was so relieved, not just that I had come through the operation, but also that I was still "me".' A week later, though still very fragile, Nicole was allowed out of hospital.

'There is a 30 per cent chance that the tumour will return. I will have to have an annual MRI scan for five years, but I prefer to think of it as there being a 70 per cent chance that it is gone for good.'

Meanwhile, Nicole is still living with the consequences of her late diagnosis. Her short-term memory has been affected because the tumour damaged the part of the brain which is responsible.

More here



Warmist pseudo-scientists admit that the hacked CRU emails are genuine

A leading climate change scientist whose private e-mails are included in thousands of documents that were stolen by hackers and posted online said the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month's global climate summit in Denmark.

Kevin Trenberth, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado, said he believes the hackers who stole a decade's worth of correspondence from a British university's computer server deliberately distributed only those documents that could help attempts by skeptics to undermine the scientific consensus on man-made climate change. Trenberth, a well respected atmospheric scientist, said it did not appear that all the documents stolen from the university had been distributed on the internet by the hackers.

The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said hackers last week stole from its computer server about a decade's worth of data from its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. About 1000 e-mails and 3000 documents have been posted on websites and seized on by climate change sceptics, who claim correspondence shows collusion between scientists to overstate the case for global warming, and evidence that some have manipulated evidence.

"It is right before the Copenhagen debate, I'm sure that is not a coincidence," Trenberth said in a telephone interview from Colorado.

At least 65 world leaders will attend the Copenhagen climate summit in December as representatives of 191 nations seek agreement on a new global treaty on limiting emissions of greenhouse gases.

Trenberth, a lead author on the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments, said he had found 102 of his own e-mails posted online. "I personally feel violated," he said. "I'm appalled at the very selective use of the e-mails, and the fact they've been taken out of context."

In one of the stolen e-mails, Trenberth is quoted as saying "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." He said the comment is presented by sceptics as evidence scientists can't explain some trends that appear to contradict their stance on climate change. Trenberth explained his phrase was actually contained in a paper he wrote about the need for better monitoring of global warming to explain the anomalies — in particular improved recording of rising sea surface temperatures.

In another e-mail posted online, and unrelated to Trenberth, the British research centre's director, Phil Jones, wrote that he had used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in a chart detailing recent global temperatures. Jones has denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been misunderstood. He said in a statement Saturday that he'd used the word trick "as in a clever thing to do."

Trenberth acknowledged that language used by some colleagues in the hacked e-mails "looks awkward at best," particularly messages which criticise climate change sceptics.

SOURCE



BBC sat on the hacked emails for over a month

By Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate correspondent for BBC Look North in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire

Very busy with forecast duties right now, but I do intend to write a blog regarding the UK Climate research centre (CRU) being hacked into, and the possible implications of this very serious affair.

I will add comment on this page as soon as I can free up some time. But I will in the meantime answer the question regarding the chain of e-mails which you have been commenting about on my blog, which can be seen here, and whether they are genuine or part of an elaborate hoax.

I was forwarded the chain of e-mails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the worlds leading climate scientists written as a direct result of my article 'whatever happened to global warming'. The e-mails released on the internet as a result of CRU being hacked into are identical to the ones I was forwarded and read at the time and so, as far as l can see, they are authentic.

SOURCE




Lord Lawson Calls For Public Inquiry Into CRU Data Affair

In response to recent revelations contained in leaked e-mails originating from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Lord Lawson, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the GWPF, has called for a rigorous and independent inquiry into the matter. While reserving judgment on the contents of the e-mails, Lord Lawson said these are very serious issues and allegations that reach to the heart of scientific integrity and credibility:

"Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals."

"There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay."

Lord Lawson added: "Since the CRU is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and is part of the University of East Anglia, we call on Edmund Wallis, the chairman of the NERC and Brandon Gough, the Chancellor of the UEA, to jointly commission an independent inquiry into the revelations, including, of course, their veracity."

Professsor David Henderson, the Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the GWPF said: "The evolution of climate policies needs to be linked to a process of inquiry, review and advice that is more open, thorough, balanced and objective than is now the case. This is the mission of the Global Warming Policy Foundation."

SOURCE



Some experiences of a British government school

"The summer term was a period of handover between the outgoing head teacher and her replacement. Just after half term, word reached us that the new head would come to the next PTA meeting. This was very exciting but, unfortunately, an appointment at work meant that I couldn’t make it. Still, I raced up to the chair of the PTA at the drop off the next morning: “How did it go? What’s she like?” I wanted to know, all puppyish enthusiasm and excitement.

The chairwoman looked gloomy. “It didn’t go great,” she admitted. “She was kind of... aggressive”. What had apparently happened was less than encouraging. The new head had started by telling us how much the teachers disliked us and harangued the committee for planning the school fayre on a Saturday . “The teachers are really fed up about that, that’s their day off, you know,” she was reported to have said. Well, yes, we do know, it’s our day off too. She finished by telling them that she didn’t understand why “you lot” had to meet in the school at all and said that in the future she would prefer it if we just went to a coffee shop instead.

“She was quite negative,” said another parent who was there with remarkable understatement.

“But... but... she’s new, why’s she being like this?” I stuttered. I had had five months of fantasising about how the new head was going to wave a wand and make everything alright; I had spent weeks imagining an era of co-operation, of raised standards, of enthusiasm, of openness, of light where there had been dark.

Perhaps we should have known better: although this had been the first formal meeting with the head and there had been clues that all might not be well. When the PTA secretary had asked at the office for the school’s constitution number (necessary in order for us to get raffle tickets printed in advance – who knew there would be so much red tape?), the new head had made excuses and sent her away empty-handed. When we discovered hundreds of expired Sainsbury’s Get Active vouchers, gathering dust in a box, the party line was that it was no one’s fault – except possibly the PTA’s. “We didn’t even exist then” seemed to cut no ice with the top brass.

We were committed to having the school fayre but I can’t say that anyone wanted it to happen – certainly not for the right reasons anyway. The teachers obviously didn’t want to be there and, it was rumoured, had been told to boycott it; the PTA would have backed out of running it altogether if there had been a face-saving way to do that. Instead, it was set to be a fete of attrition. The school wouldn’t ban the fayre but they certainly weren’t going to help: any equipment we asked to borrow, we were told was either lost, broken or had never been there in the first place.

So, on the first cloud-strewn day of the summer, we turned up at the bunting-swagged playground and set up our stalls: parents, parents of parents, uncles, aunts, friends, the odd governor and, much to our astonishment, the outgoing head, her deputy and one other teacher. Oh, and the caretaker. “Looks like rain,” he said, as cheerful as I had ever seen him. “Those gazebos are going to be blown right over if this wind picks up,” he added shaking his head gleefully.

“Why are you so happy about that?” asked one of the helpers. “I’m just saying,” he snapped, stalking off towards the tombola to snatch the gaffer tape from someone trying to stick up a sign (“That costs twelve quid a roll!”).

A slow trickle of parents started to arrive, politely buying cakes, burgers, tickets for the bottle stall and asking, equally politely, where all the teachers were. We shrugged and mumbled. The people who came seemed to enjoy themselves; the children whooping round, boing-ing about on the bouncy castle (“Why didn’t you just borrow the school’s one?” asked one ex-governor innocently), throwing wet sponges at each other in the absence of any teachers willing to go in our newly-built stocks.

Two hours later, we knew the event had come to a close when the caretaker returned and tipped the water out of the “Pluck a Duck” paddling pool (while one puzzled child was still mid-pluck) barking: “Go home!” We poured the takings onto four pushed-together desks and counted: £2,000!. We added up the outgoings - £1,000!

Still, not a bad profit, it had to be worth a few skipping ropes, maybe even some monkey bars or a swing set. We asked the new head to meet us, the following week so we could choose some equipment with her. She was too busy. The week after? The same. The week after? It became obvious that no meeting was going to take place. The chair of the PTA spoke to the “playground co-ordinator” and asked if we could have the telephone number of her equipment suppliers so we could see, at least theoretically, what our money could buy. No, we couldn’t. It was the end of the term, the end of the school year and although we had raised money, we had achieved precisely nothing.

I hate my daughter’s school, I really hate it. I hate it not simply because it is a low-achieving island in a sea of success. A year ago I would have put its failings at least partly down to a lack of interest by the parents of children there – a stupid, snobbish assumption, I admit. The school may be failing the pupils there in a thousand tiny ways but I haven’t met a single parent who doesn’t care about their child’s education. Teachers don’t get an easy press and a lot of the complaints hurled at them are unfair but at schools such as my daughter’s, I can’t help feeling that they have switched off, that “it’ll do” is good enough; that the children are seen as almost getting in the way of their jobs. As the outgoing head said to me at one stage with a rueful sigh: “The problem is we have so many children where English isn’t spoken at home. You can get them up to a reading age of eight but, after that, there’s not much you can do.”

Over the summer holidays, the PTA chair decided to emigrate – “I’m not saying it’s all about the school but, yeah, that’s a major part of our decision”. The rest of us check our positions on waiting lists at other schools on a weekly basis and make plans to move. And in the meantime we hope, really, really hope that things will change.

SOURCE



More negligence from British child protection authority

Takes refuge in secrecy

A boy of two was allowed to remain in the care of a blind 82-year-old widow by the council involved in the tragedy of Baby P. Social workers from Haringey said the child was 'thriving' with the frail pensioner, who had once fostered his mother.

But the widow's family accuse the North London council of ignoring a series of warnings that she was too old to cope. They claim it failed to act even when the tiny, six-stone [84 lb.] great-grandmother collapsed from exhaustion after caring for the child for almost two months.

She died this month after falling down stairs at her home, where she lived alone with the child. Doctors believe she lay unconscious and bleeding for up to six hours until the boy answered the phone to one of her friends and could not pass it to his 'Nanny'. Her angry relatives said they believed the Labour-run council was to blame for the tragedy.

The council says it wanted to take the child away from the widow and instigated emergency care proceedings. However, the child was under its supervision for 18 months before the case came to court and the family feel that Haringey is guilty of dragging its feet. Her son said: 'Social workers came to her house, they saw how old and frail she was, but they went away and did nothing. 'She was too old to cope with a child that age but she was too proud to say she couldn't manage.'

The events unfolded in the aftermath of 17-month- old Baby P's death following appalling abuse from his mother, her boyfriend and her lodger, who are all in prison. Haringey was already under intense scrutiny for its failures over the murder of eight-year-old torture victim Victoria Climbie in 2000. It has apologised for its failures over the death of Baby P, who can now be named as Peter Connelly after anonymity was lifted in the case, and dismissed five officials over the scandal.

But when the Daily Mail contacted the under-fire council over the death of the pensioner, its officials sought an emergency court order to stop details of the case being made public. The High Court order prevents us from naming the child or the pensioner....

The tragic case is made all the more extraordinary by the plight of countless grandparents who have been told they are too old to foster their own grandchildren. This year social workers decided to rehome two children with a gay couple after their mother's parents were judged 'too old' to care for them. Edinburgh Council took the decision even though the couple, aged 59 and 46, had cared for the boy and girl while their daughter fought a heroin addiction.

More HERE





24 November, 2009

They don't make them like this nowadays

The fight led to great loss of life but the spirit it showed appears to have prevented much worse

It was, on paper, one of the Second World War’s worst naval disasters, costing almost 300 British lives. But it was also an act of extraordinary heroism, which Winston Churchill said was in the great tradition of Drake and Nelson.

Seventy years ago, in the freezing waters off Iceland, the British merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi — armed with little more than pre-First World War guns — found itself confronting two of the deadliest battleships in the German navy.

This week, a reception will be held to commemorate the incident, which some believe should have been marked by the award of a posthumous Victoria Cross for the man who led it.

On the bridge of the British ship , on November 23, 1939, stood Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, a 60-year-old Scot, father of the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy, with a distinguished naval career behind him, who had come out of retirement to command the Rawalpindi. Its role was to intercept merchant vessels carrying grain to Germany but, in the darkening afternoon, Captain Kennedy saw something far more threatening — the silhouette of an enemy battleship.

In fact there were two – the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, each weighing 32,000 tons, with a maximum speed of 31 knots, and fitted with state-of-the-art guns and armour plating. The British ship stood no chance. Kennedy took immediate evasive action but was outrun. Ordered to surrender, he faced a momentous choice — whether to give in or to fight.

Turning to his chief engineer, he remarked calmly: “We’ll fight them both, they’ll sink us, and that will be that. Goodbye.” They shook hands.

The Rawalpindi’s first salvos hit the Gneisenau but fell short of the Scharnhorst. Both ships opened fire, to devastating effect. Fifteen minutes later it was all over.

They destroyed the Rawalpindi’s bridge, wireless room, gunnery control room and engine room, plunging the ship in darkness and disabling the electric ammunition hoists. Kennedy ordered shells to be pulled up by hand and rolled to the guns, now forced to fire independently. Although the ship was on fire the guns kept firing, scoring hits on both German vessels. But as Kennedy went aft with two ratings to organise a smokescreen, they were met by another enemy salvo. All three were instantly killed.

By this stage Rawalpindi’s steering gear was out of action, her water supply had failed and her guns fell silent. As the crew took to the lifeboats, a shell the Scharnhorst penetrated Rawalpindi’s forward magazine, causing a huge explosion. The ship split in two and began to sink.

The loss of her Captain and nearly all her 300 crew was a devastating blow so early in the war. But back home, the engagement caught the public’s imagination. The press portrayed the action as a sign that the fighting spirit of the Royal Navy had not been broken. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, spoke of Kennedy in the same breath as Drake, Hood and Nelson.

Among naval historians, controversy still surrounds Kennedy’s orders, which had been been to evade action, not seek it out. But, in fact, the circumstances of that day left him with no alternative. The Rawalpindi did its best to seek the shelter of a fog bank, and sent out smoke floats, which failed to ignite. An iceberg four miles away offered better protection, but it was too late. The outcome of Kennedy’s refusal to surrender led to the loss of his ship and most of its crew. But it was also a significant setback for the German navy. Not only did the Rawalpindi inflict damage on the two battleships but it ensured that they gave up any notion of breaking out into the Atlantic, which could have been disastrous for the Allies.

Out of a crew of 300, only 37 sailors were rescued: 26 were picked up from Rawalpindi’s lifeboats by the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, while a further ten were rescued from another lifeboat the following afternoon by Rawalpindi’s sister ship, HMS Chitral.

An eleventh man, Harry Fleming, 21, from east London, had managed to scramble on to the keel of an overturned lifeboat with three others. One by one they had slipped, exhausted, into the sea, leaving Harry on his own.

Harry’s son Michael Fleming, born in 1940, explains what happened next: “The Chitral saw the upturned lifeboat and the body on it. She steamed slowly past but my father couldn’t move, he was frozen and couldn’t get his hands off the keel. The men on the Chitral’s bridgehead thought he was dead but one signalman, who kept looking backwards, saw my father rip one hand off the keel and raise it, and the guy shouted ‘He’s still alive!’

“They turned and picked him up. He’d been in the sea 23 hours.”

SOURCE



A British Navy vessel was just 50ft away as pirates kidnapped a British yacht couple. Why didn't the navy stop the pirates? Human rights, of course...

Mid-ocean, a degree or two shy of the Equator, two ships are steaming south, apparently in convoy. One is a Singaporean flagged container vessel of 25,000 tonnes, the Kota Wajar. The other is a British military tanker, flying the blue ensign of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Service. Neither was built for battle. Nor in normal circumstances would they be foes. But a whiff of gunpowder is palpably in the air. Aboard the tanker, RFA Wave Knight, Royal Navy gun crews have closed up for action, their 30mm cannon and machine guns primed and ready.

A few hundred yards away on the Kota Wajar, Somali pirates, who had recently hijacked the vessel, possess a variety of small arms including rocket-propelled grenades. These are high stakes, indeed, because both ships are on course to rendezvous with a British yacht drifting helplessly in the Indian Ocean. Aboard this 38ft yacht, and held at gunpoint by a pirate advance party, are Paul and Rachel Chandler, a retired couple from Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

The Kota Wajar, in its new role as a pirate ‘mother ship’, is to scoop them up and carry them back to captivity and a multi-million-pound ransom in Somalia more than 200 miles to the north-west. A burst of gunfire from the Wave Knight cuts across the bow of the hijacked container vessel in the first overtly aggressive act of the chase. Surely the Chandlers will be plucked to safety?

What happened next has been described as ‘depressing’ and ‘shameful’. And ‘hardly in the tradition of Nelson’ - which is something of an understatement. Not that any of us would have known about it if a sailor aboard the Wave Knight had not blown the official Ministry of Defence version of events out of the water. That original MoD briefing had deliberately created the impression that the meeting between Wave Knight and Kota Wajar never happened. Indeed, MoD spokesmen suggested that Wave Knight had simply come across the yacht empty and adrift on the High Seas; the Chandlers had already been taken hostage and had been whisked away before British forces arrived on the scene to answer their distress signal.

This was very definitely not the case. The Wave Knight, it seems, might even have been as close as 50ft to the Chandlers as they were taken aboard the Kota Wajar and off to Africa, under the apparently helpless gaze of 100 Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary sailors.

The Navy’s ignominy over the incident has parallels with the infamous 2007 incident when 15 armed Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines on small boat patrol in the Shatt al-Arab waterway near Basra were taken prisoner by Iranian seaborne forces without a shot being fired. The personnel were kept for 12 days and paraded for the world’s media, reducing what was once the finest fighting force in the world to a laughing stock. After they were freed, one sailor confessed that he had cried himself to sleep when the Iranians took his iPod.

As more facts come to light about the capture of the Chandlers - and they do so slowly, as the MoD still refuses to confirm what really happened - awkward questions about tactics against pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean have to be asked. Military personnel in the region feel that ‘their hands are tied’ by policies that prevent them from prosecuting a more aggressive campaign against the buccaneers, because of the latter’s ‘human rights’.

As British maritime security expert and former Royal Marine David Pickard of the risk mitigation firm Drum Cussac remarks: ‘There has been quite a change in British Rules of Engagement since the time of Henry VIII. ‘In his day, the law demanded the summary execution of all pirates. Recently the Home Office has been more concerned that pirates captured off Somalia would simply claim political asylum in the UK.’ The belief is that, once in Royal Navy custody, the pirates would claim it a breach of their rights to send them back to the anarchy in Somalia.

Since 1991, the country has been a failed state and local criminals are able to use the long Somali coastline as a safe base for pirate operations, hijacking passing vessels which, along with their crews, are then held for ransom. As the Gulf of Aden is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the pickings are rich.

The international community had to act. United Nations resolutions were passed. But this international anti-piracy operation is fragmented and incoherent. At various times, Royal Navy ships in the area have been under the command of Nato, the EU and a third, multi-national organisation called Combined Maritime Forces Task Force 151. Each body has its own ‘subtly different’ Rules of Engagement for dealing with pirates. But it is understood that in all cases, British forces are not supposed to open fire on pirates unless in self-defence or when the lives of others are in immediate danger.

And so, unless pirates open fire first - as they did last year on Royal Marines from HMS Cumberland, with fatal consequences to themselves - the Navy cannot engage in battle. Nor can pirates be arrested unless caught in the act of taking a ship. In June, units from HMS Portland intercepted two boats full of armed Somalis, obviously on a piratical mission. But the Rules of Engagement meant that the British sailors could only throw the pirates’ weapons overboard and sink their faster boat. The Somalis were then given enough fuel to return to the mainland in the remaining boat - scot free.

And so, in the absence of any effective deterrence, the attacks continue - as the Chandlers found to their cost....

More HERE



High rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health among NHS medical staff

Health trusts must do more to help doctors and nurses exercise and give up smoking and heavy drinking, says the Government. NHS organisations will be expected to improve access to intervention programmes such as counselling or gyms as part of a drive to reduce sickness absence, which costs £1.5 billion a year. The first national audit of staff habits has found that high rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health were having a direct impact on the quality of patient care.

The Health Secretary is expected to accept all the recommendations of the final review, drawn up by Steve Boorman, a leading occupational health expert, in a written ministerial statement. The review found that more than 45,000 NHS workers called in sick each day — one and a half times the rate of absence in the private sector.

However, the Department of Health has suggested that health workers should be encouraged to set an example for patients and the general public when it came to promoting healthy lifestyles.

The review found that hospitals whose staff were in poorer health were less productive and had higher rates of patient mortality and superbug infection. More than three quarters of 11,000 staff polled acknowledged that the state of their health affected patient care.

Dr Boorman, a former GP and the chief medical adviser to Royal Mail, told The Times earlier this year that health awareness among NHS staff was “very inconsistent”. He said that a clear correlation had emerged between the performance of hospitals and staff health. His recommendations include cutting smoking rates in the NHS, which are the same as in the general population, and providing more time or opportunities for staff to exercise. Health workers with musculoskeletal and mental health conditions are also to be promised access to early interventions such as physiotherapy or counselling.

The review will call on trusts to appoint health and wellbeing leaders at board level to bring down rates of obesity, drinking and smoking, and on the Department of Health to devise and implement national standards and provide resources to ensure that these standards are given priority. It estimates that reducing the number of sick days taken by staff by a third would save the NHS £555 million a year.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “The NHS needs to be serious about the health of its staff if it is to improve the health of the nation. All NHS organisations should have a proactive and focused health and wellbeing strategy in place.”

SOURCE



British Citizenship language scam exposed

Immigrants who don’t understand English have been able to buy language certificates that give them the right to settle in Britain.

An investigation by The Sunday Times has found that staff at English language colleges in London and Birmingham have been offering migrants who speak little or no English Home Office-regulated English and Citizenship certificates for £250 each. Tests are rigged to allow almost anyone to pass.

Staff hand out crib sheets with questions and answers in English. Others let candidates write the sound of English words on the sheets in their own tongue, so the answers appear right, but they don’t know what they are saying.

At the UK Learning Academy in Birmingham, a staff assessor told an undercover reporter that candidates did not have to take any courses or speak any English to pass the tests. The assessor simply asked if the candidate knew their own name, date of birth and address. When told that they did, the assessor replied: “That’s all right then. That’s a guaranteed pass.”

Yesterday the Academy said it had sacked the assessor for “gross misconduct”. Directors at a second college under investigation said they had suspended its English course, while a third college removed the website advertising its course.

Chris Grayling, shadow home secretary, said: “These revelations are particularly alarming and reveal another major abuse of our system for immigration.” He called for the certificates to be suspended.

SOURCE



Oxbridge is clearly guilty of pursuing excellence

Oxbridge demands very high A-level passes and produces many students with good degrees, very few of whom drop out. Where is the problem, wonders Simon Heffer

Something called the Higher Education Policy Institute clearly has nothing to spend its money on. It has conducted elaborate research that concluded that Oxbridge demands very high A-level passes and produces many students with good degrees, very few of whom drop out.

Oddly enough, I thought that was the point of Oxbridge: they are the best universities in the country, and they do this by taking the best people, who are usually motivated to do well. This proof of such an apparently disgusting pursuit of excellence on behalf of our country has prompted yet more boring accusations of elitism – following recent observations by Lord Rumba of Rio that A-levels alone should not regulate admissions to universities.

The next step, no doubt, is for him to argue that intelligence should not regulate the class of degree. The point is that with state schools being run into the ground by the repulsive Ed Balls, Oxbridge has to rely on private sector products, and imports, to maintain its high standards. Whoever's fault that is, it is not Oxbridge's.

SOURCE



Hacked files of the Climatic Research Unit, Global Warming a deliberate fraud

By climatologist Dr. Tim Ball

Global Warming is often called a hoax. I disagree because a hoax has a humorous intent to puncture pomposity. In science, such as with the Piltdown Man hoax, it was done to expose those with fervent but blind belief. The argument that global warming is due to humans, known as the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) is a deliberate fraud. I can now make that statement without fear of contradiction because of a remarkable hacking of files that provided not just a smoking gun, but an entire battery of machine guns.

Someone hacked in to the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia. A very large file (61 mb) was downloaded and posted to the web. Phil Jones Director of the CRU has acknowledged the files are theirs. They contain papers, documents letters and emails. The latter are the most damaging and contain blunt information about the degree of manipulation of climate science in general and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in particular.

Climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists

Dominant names involved are ones I have followed throughout my career including, Phil Jones, Benjamin Santer, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Jonathan Overpeck, Ken Briffa and Tom Wigley. I have watched climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists. This small, elite, community was named by Professor Wegman in his report to the National Academy of Science (NAS).

I had the pleasure of meeting the founder of CRU Professor Hubert Lamb, considered the Father of Modern Climatology, on a couple of occasions. He also peer reviewed one of my early publications. I know he would be mortified with what was disclosed in the last couple of days.

Jones claims the files were obtained illegally as if that absolves the content. It doesn’t and it is enough to destroy all their careers. Jones gave a foretaste of his behavior in 2005. Warwick Hughes asked for the data and method he used for his claim of a 0.6°C temperature rise since the end of the nineteenth century. Jones responded, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” He has stonewalled ever since. The main reason was because it was used as a key argument in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports to convince the world humans caused rapid warming in the 20th century. The emails obtained are a frightening record of arrogance, and deception far beyond his 2005 effort.

Another glimpse into what the files and emails reveal was the report by Professor Deming. He wrote, “ With publication of an article in Science (in 1995) I gained sufficient credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said. “We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The person in question was Jonathan Overpeck and his even more revealing emails are part of those exposed by the hacker. It is now very clear that Deming’s charge was precise. They have perverted science in the service of social and political causes.

Professor Wegman showed how this “community of scientists” published together and peer reviewed each other’s work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.

Total Control

These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.

CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in “I told you so.”

You can download the climate change fraud documents here or here.

SOURCE



The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: Now Searchable!

Here's a crazy thought: What if it was Briffa who released the emails? He is known to have been depressed lately and the email below reveals him to be in great conflict over what he is doing. And the now undisputed revelation that his past work depended on the tree rings from just one tree must have hurt him -- JR

The CRU emails are now searchable. Here's one I stumbled across. (Read from bottom up.)

From: Keith Briffa To: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx Subject: Re: quick note on TAR Date: Sun Apr 29 19:53:16 2007

Mike

Your words are a real boost to me at the moment. I found myself questioning the whole process and being often frustrated at the formulaic way things had to be done - often wasting time and going down dead ends. I really thank you for taking the time to say these kind words. I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same. I worried that you might think I gave the impression of not supporting you well enough while trying to report on the issues and uncertainties. Much had to be removed and I was particularly unhappy that I could not get the statement into the SPM regarding the AR4 reinforcement of the results and conclusions of the TAR. I tried my best but we were basically railroaded by Susan*. I am happy to pass the mantle on to someone else next time. I feel I have basically produced nothing original or substantive of my own since this whole process started. I am at this moment having to work on the ENV submission to the forthcoming UK Research Assessment exercise , again instead of actually doing some useful research! Anyway thanks again Mike.... really appreciated when it comes from you very best wishes

Keith

Keith

At 18:14 29/04/2007, you wrote:

Keith, just a quick note to let you know I've had a chance to read over the key bits on last millennium in the final version of the chapter, and I think you did a great job. obviously, this was one of the most (if not the most) contentious areas in the entire report, and you found a way to (in my view) convey the the science accurately, but in a way that I believe will be immune to criticisms of bias or neglect--you dealt w/ all of the controversies, but in a very even-handed and fair way. bravo! I hope you have an opportunity to relax a bit now. looking forward to buying you a beer next time we have an opportunity :)

mike

(*I believe he's referring to Susan Solomon here.)

A more detailed examination of a different series of emails pertaining to Briffa's work is up at Powerline. [See below -- JR]

SOURCE



The global warming alarmists act like a gang of co-conspirators rather than respectable scientists

One of the hacked East Anglia emails that has gotten considerable play on the web indicates that several alarmist scientists deleted emails that were subject to a Freedom of Information Act request rather than produce them. That's true; here is the context.

On May 27, 2008, David Palmer, who is in charge of "data protection" at the University of East Anglia, wrote to Tim Osborn about a Freedom of Information Act request the university had received from one David Holland: "Please note the response received today from Mr. Holland. Could you provide input as to his additional questions 1, and 2, and check with Mr. Ammann in question 3 as to whether he believes his correspondence with us to be confidential? Although I fear/anticipate the response, I believe that I should inform the requester that his request will be over the appropriate limit and ask him to limit it.... I just wish to ensure that we do as much as possible 'by the book' in this instance as I am certain that this will end up in an appeal, with the statutory potential to end up with the ICO."

Thus, the same day, Tim Osborn wrote to Caspar Amman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado: "Our university has received a request, under the UK Freedom of Information law, from someone called David Holland for emails or other documents that you may have sent to us that discuss any matters related to the IPCC assessment process. We are not sure what our university's response will be, nor have we even checked whether you sent us emails that relate to the IPCC assessment or that we retained any that you may have sent. However, it would be useful to know your opinion on this matter. In particular, we would like to know whether you consider any emails that you sent to us as confidential. Sorry to bother you with this, Tim (cc Keith & Phil)"

The point was to lay foundation for an objection to producing such emails on the ground that they were "confidential." Amman replied: "Oh MAN! will this crap ever end?? Well, I will have to properly answer in a couple days when I get a chance digging through emails. I don't recall from the top of my head any specifics about IPCC. I'm also sorry that you guys have to go through this BS."

Osborn replied: "Hi again Caspar, I don't think it is necessary for you to dig through any emails you may have sent us to determine your answer. Our question is a more general one, which is whether you generally consider emails that you sent us to have been sent in confidence. If you do, then we will use this as a reason to decline the request. Cheers, Tim"

That was followed by this more formal response from Amman on May 30: "In response to your inquiry about my take on the confidentiality of my email communications with you, Keith or Phil, I have to say that the intent of these emails is to reply or communicate with the individuals on the distribution list, and they are not intended for general 'publication'. If I would consider my texts to potentially get wider dissemination then I would probably have written them in a different style. Having said that, as far as I can remember (and I haven't checked in the records, if they even still exist) I have never written an explicit statement on these messages that would label them strictly confidential. Caspar"

In the meantime, though, Osborn and his colleagues had already taken matters into their own hands. On May 29, Phil Jones wrote to Michael Mann, with the subject heading "IPCC & FOI": "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have with Keith re AR4? ["AR4" is common shorthand for the U.N. IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, which was released in 2007.] Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

These emails appear to show that, when faced with a legitimate request under Britain's Freedom of Information Act, these global warming alarmists preferred to delete their emails with one another about the crucially important IPCC report --the main basis for the purported "consensus" in favor of anthropogenic global warming--rather than allow them to come to light. This is one of many instances in the East Anglia documents where the global warming alarmists act like a gang of co-conspirators rather than respectable scientists.

SOURCE



The savage battle to suppress scientific dissent

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.

While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate -- nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal -- public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.

In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes. "I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who comes under fire in the e-mails, said these same academics repeatedly criticized him for not having published more peer-reviewed papers. "There's an egregious problem here, their intimidation of journal editors," he said. "They're saying, 'If you print anything by this group, we won't send you any papers.' "

Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in public," he said.

Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who has questioned whether climate change is human-caused, blogged that the e-mails have "the makings of a very big" scandal. "Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research," he added.

The story of the hacking has ranked among the most popular on Web sites ranging from The Washington Post's to that of London's Daily Telegraph. And it has spurred a flood of e-mails from climate skeptics to U.S. news organizations, some likening the disclosure to the release of the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam.

SOURCE



Fad diets INCREASE weight

Celebrity 'fad' diets are fuelling the obesity epidemic, doctors warn. They claim such plans are actually keeping people fat, with just one in ten Britons predicted to be a healthy weight by 2050. And they say weight-watchers should curb the amount they eat, rather than follow diets which offer only a short-term solution.

Diets that recommend eating only grapefruit, for example, or fruit and seeds found in the Bible should be avoided, says Professor Chris Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology. He also criticised the Tiger diet - which advocates uncooked food and is reportedly followed by Mel Gibson - and the apple diet, which claims to boost the body's acidity and fight disease.

A survey commissioned by the BSG shows most dieters will try anything to get thin - except follow a sensible eating and exercise plan that has been shown to work. One in 20 women said they would try the Atkins diet to lose weight - even though only 2 per cent think it is good for their health. At the same time, one in five of the 2,000 Britons questioned admitted they would use weight loss pills to help shed excess pounds.

Professor Hawkey, speaking today at the Gastro 2009 conference in London, will claim ruthless promotion of unhealthy foods and diets has fostered over-eating and the growth of pathological attitudes to eating. These include anorexia, bulimia, orthorexia - an obsession with eating 'good' foods - and malnutrition.

Professor Hawkey said: 'In food fadism the virtue of favoured foods is exaggerated and purported to cure specific diseases, while supposedly harmful foods are eliminated from the diet. 'Foods fads are often based on a well elaborated scientific or, more often, pseudo-scientific theory but such is the complexity of diet that the specific value of the nutritional content is seldom tested.' And he will tell the conference: 'The problem facing society is not the content of our diet but the quantity we are consuming.

'We need to do away with quirky diets and get people to realise what will keep them healthy. 'In the majority of cases, simply increasing physical activity levels and eating sensibly will help prevent long-term conditions.'

David Haslam, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: 'Diets don't work. You may lose weight in the short term, and there are a few exceptions when people manage to keep it off. 'But most people put the weight back on. The most effective way is making sustainable changes to reduce dietary intake and increase physical activity.'

SOURCE



Modern 'superdiets' based on myths, says expert

Another report of the speech mentioned above. This guy is a real truth teller. He even has some time for the hated Atkins diet

Superdiets such as drinking large amounts of grapefruit juice or eating only raw fruit and vegetables have been exposed as just food myths, a leading professor claims. Professor Chris Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG), said some people developed a “quasi-religious” attitude towards what was the best thing to eat, based on little or no scientific evidence.

He highlighted more than a dozen famous diets including rawism, which argues that cooking food makes it less nutritious, the grapefruit diet, based on the idea that an enzyme in the juice breaks down fat, and the alkaline diet, which seeks to maintain the slightly alkaline nature of the blood by eating certain foods. “Food has been shrouded in myths and fairy tales since time immemorial," said Professor Hawkey at the Gastro 2009 conference, which is being held in London until Wednesday. “But what’s important is to recognise that, despite the popularity of fad diets, we are losing a grip on the fight with obesity.”

He said the grapefruit diet, which Kylie Minogue has reportedly used, was unlikely to have an effect because the enzyme would probably be broken down in the gut before being able to get at body fat.

Professor Hawkey also flagged up the lack of evidence for the ‘chewing movement’, which dates back to the 19th century and counsels chewing 32 times to aid digestion. “[Former Prime Minister] Gladstone was apparently very eccentrically in favour of this diet. The idea is that salivary enzymes start digestion,” he said, adding that it was based more on “theory than evidence”.

However he had mixed feelings about the controversial Atkins diet, which says people should avoid carbohydrate and eat protein. “It is not terribly healthy in the sense that you are going to have a lot of fat, but if you lose weight then it is a good thing,” Professor Hawkey said. “The theory is that it resets the metabolic rate and there is some science to back that up.”

SOURCE



Documents detail Iraq war chaos in Britain: "Leaked British government documents call into question ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public statements on the buildup to the Iraq war and show plans for the U.S.-led 2003 invasion were being made more than a year earlier, a newspaper reported Sunday. Britain’s Sunday Telegraph published details of private statements made by senior British military figures claiming plans were in place months before the March 2003 invasion, but were so badly drafted they left troops poorly equipped and ill-prepared for the conflict.”





23 November, 2009

Some graphic evidence of CRU crookedness

A picture is worth ...





Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

The secret emails of the CRU have got a LOT of attention in the press by now. Even the NYT has weighed in, contrary to its usual practice of ignoring news it doesn't like. So it is difficult to know what to reproduce here but I have chosen two pieces below -- JR

By James Delingpole

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest: " Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more."

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting: “In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence: "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up: "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Suppression of evidence: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists: "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP): "……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority: “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?” “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight. But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

SOURCE



The Warmist conspiracy: the emails that most damn Jones

An excerpt from Andrew Bolt's latest comment:

These are the emails that should have Professor Phil Jones most worried about his future. Jones, head of the CRU unit whose emails were leaked, has been under most fire so far over one email in particular in which he boasted of using a ‘“trick" to “hide the decline” that would have otherwise spoiled his graph showing temperatures soaring ever-upward.

But far more serious - at least in a legal sense - may be his apparent boasting of destroying data to stop sceptics from checking this alarmist work. If, as some emails suggest, he destroyed it to thwart FOI requests from Professor Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre, who’d already exposed as fake the Michael Mann “hockey stick”, Jones, one of the most active of the IPCC lead authors, could even face criminal charges.

(Note: in saying that, I should add that these emails may simply be poorly worded, out of context or even altered by the whistleblower who leaked them. Jones may also not knowingly have done anything wrong, and there is no proof that he did anything against the law. UPDATE: Several updates on Jones below, including his “selfish” wish to see global warming “regardless of the consequences” just to be proved right.)

Whether laws were broken or not, the emails prove beyond doubt how resistant Jones and his colleagues were to having their work properly scrutinised by anyone not of their “team”. No wonder, perhaps, when the documents reveal Jones has so far attracted $25 million in grants.)

The most damning emails on this point are the following, starting with 1107454306.txt, in which Jones refers to MM - McIntyre and McKitrick:

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:

Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !

Jones admits he was warned by his own university against deleting data subjected to an FOI request from McIntyre - or anyone:

From: Phil Jones

To: santer1@XXXX

Subject: Re: A quick question

Date: Wed Dec 10 10:14:10 2008

Ben,

Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his £10, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email.

Anyway requests have been of three types - observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter - and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these - all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business - and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here!

Makes you wonder very strongly what Jones is trying to hide, doesn’t it? Also makes you laugh all over again at his claim once that the data being sought had, sadly, been ... um, lost.

In1212063122.txtm, Jones urges another colleague, Michael “Hockey Stick”, Mann, to join in the deleting - at least of emails about the IPCC’s controversial ARA report on man-made warming which Jones co-authored, and which claimed warming was “unequivocal” and “most likely” caused by humans:

From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann”

Subject: IPCC & FOI

Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil:

For years Jones has made clear his determination to keep crucial data from the eyes of sceptics:

From: Phil Jones To: mann@xxx.edu

Subject: Fwd: CCNet: PRESSURE GROWING ON CONTROVERSIAL RESEARCHER TO DISCLOSE SECRET DATA

Date: Mon Feb 21 16:28:32 2005

Cc: “raymond s. bradley” , “Malcolm Hughes”

Mike, Ray and Malcolm,

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here ! Maybe we can use this to our advantage to get the series updated !

Odd idea to update the proxies with satellite estimates of the lower troposphere rather than surface data !. Odder still that they don’t realise that Moberg et al used the Jones and Moberg updated series !

Francis Zwiers is till onside. He said that PC1s produce hockey sticks. He stressed that the late 20th century is the warmest of the millennium, but Regaldo didn’t bother with that. Also ignored Francis’ comment about all the other series looking similar to MBH.

The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate !

Cheers

Phil

PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.

Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!

And when Jones is really forced to the point of handing over his data, he considers ways to may checking it more difficult or annoying:

Options appear to be:

Send them the data

Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

But Jones figures a way out:

At 04:53 AM 5/9/2008, you wrote:

Mike, Ray, Caspar,

A couple of things - don’t pass on either…

2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we’ve found a way around this…

This message will self destruct in 10 seconds!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

More HERE



Greenies partly responsible for British flood disaster

And they're not repentant. People are disposable

Furious Cockermouth residents have complained that fears over disturbing salmon spawning has made the flooding problem far worse this year. Residents had called for the river bed to be dug into by 10ft in order to prevent flooding following discussions about the problem with the authorities earlier this year. But they claim their plan was rejected by the Environment Agency because it would interfere with salmon laying their eggs in the River Derwent.

Today residents reacted with fury and complained that the authorities are treating salmon as being 'more important than people.' Jacqui White, Gote Road, Cockermouth, said: 'I attended a meeting with Natural England earlier this year when we told them we wanted to dig 10ft deeper so that the waters wouldn't flood and alleviate any flooding. 'But the officials there stood up and told the meeting that the salmon in the river were more important.' Jacqui added: 'I've been here 16 years. I know the area is prone to flooding, and it was bad in 2005, but this year is definitely the worst."

Fiona Tunstall, 38, was left in tears after her terraced home was flooded in Gote Road yesterday. She said: 'The authorities seem to think salmon is more important than people and their houses.' 'The residents of this street had a meeting with Natural England and other authorities because they wanted to dig 10ft down into the riverbed around this street. 'Natural England wouldn't let them because would be detrimental to salmon to do that.

'If it had been dug, then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess now. 'My kitchen and living room are under about 4ft of water yesterday. My carpets, and my sofa and everything else are under water now. 'We have lost everything. 'My four-year-old Ryan, just cried and cried. 'I don't know what we are going to do. We'll have no electricity and no water, I don't know how I'm going to feed us. 'Something needs to be done. It's ridiculous. I've got not contents insurance. 'I'm so angry with the Environment Agency. They didn't contact me even though I gave them my phone numbers ages ago. I gave them that because they give you a phone call or a text to warn you your house is under threat, but obviously I never got that. 'I don't want to go back to my house.'

Maggie Robinson, Natural's England's Freshwater Advisor for the North West Region, said: 'The River Derwent has been designated as a site of special scientific interest and an important area of conservation. 'It's one of the most important rivers of its kind in Europe. 'It has some of the rarest species of fish in Europe, the river has Atlantic salmon and three different species of lamprey. 'The river, although being nutrient poor, supports some important species of moss and other river fauna.

'Digging into the bed of a river isn't always the best thing to do because it can undermine the channel and riverbed which can cause more deposition cause problems. 'Atlantic salmon are considered throughout Europe to be rare. Salmon dig into reeds in the gravel on the riverbed and they lay their eggs in the reeds.

SOURCE



Sikh Rajinder Singh set to become BNP’s first non-white member

Sikhs do of course have an heroic record of defending their land and faith against Muslim attack

A Sikh who claims that Islam is based on “deception, fraud and surprise attack” is set to become the first non-white member of the British National Party. Rajinder Singh, 78, who emigrated from the Punjab region of India in 1967, said yesterday that he would be honoured to become a member of the BNP because it is the “only party who has the guts to say the word Muslim”. “It’s a natural process in the Muslim psyche, to take over. The fear of Islam is well founded, well justified,” he told The Times. “I don’t hate Muslims. By definition a Sikh is supposed to love all — even the enemy.”

The retired schoolteacher will be put forward by the far Right party’s executive as its first non-white member after it makes changes to its constitution. The BNP was forced to agree to the changes in September after the Equality and Human Rights Commission took legal action against the party claiming that its rules, which restricted membership to “indigenous Caucasians”, were a breach of the Race Relations Act. Its membership is currently frozen because of the legal action, but once BNP members agree to the changes in a national ballot, expected in the next three months, Mr Singh will be put forward as a member.

The BNP has accepted only white members since its foundation in 1982, leading to widespread accusations that it is a racist organisation. Its leader, Nick Griffin, has a conviction for inciting racial hatred. But Mr Singh, who provided a character reference for Mr Griffin at his trial, said that he was a long-term supporter and was prepared to overlook the issue of racism. “I think Britain is a lot more important than me. I have to put my own ego aside and think for Britain. They were (racist) but if they pass this bill they will not be.”

The BNP often campaigns about the “Islamification” of Britain, claiming that “colonisation” by Muslims is destroying Anglo-Saxon heritage. Mr Singh told The Times that Britain was in danger of being taken over by Muslims and the BNP was the only party prepared to do anything about it. He blames Islam for the death of his father during the partition of India in 1947, which led to the deaths of an estimated two million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. “I am a victim of Islamic aggression. The individual Muslim is a good guy. He is my neighbour, he is working hard. But when they are all together, everybody should be very fearful. The other parties are not standing up for the national interest.”

John Walker, a spokesman for the BNP, said that Mr Griffin was in favour of Mr Singh’s membership once the constitution was changed. “I don’t think it will make a massive change to the party. It doesn’t change our stance on immigration. People like Rajinder accept the party’s position. He’s a guest of our country: he agrees to abide by our laws and customs.”

Mr Singh said that the issue of Islam was not the only reason he supported the BNP, adding that the other parties were “covered in black paint” over the expenses saga.

SOURCE



Latest political brainwave in Britain: NHS will provide free marriage guidance

Talking therapies are generally useless but so is the NHS on many occasions so I suppose it is a fit. They already support acupuncture. Getting real medicine -- like getting diagnostic tests done -- however, is often too hard. The NHS is run by politics not science or economics

Couples are to be offered marriage guidance counselling for free on the NHS, in a move which has drawn strong condemnation from patients and doctors' groups. Couples with relationship problems will be offered free sessions for up to six months, as part of a £270 million programme to increase the provision of "talking therapies" for the public, Andy Burnham, the health secretary, will announce this week.

Doctors and patients' groups said they were "horrified" by the use of NHS resources for relationship advice when patients with cancer and dementia were being denied treatment they desperately needed.

Mr Burnham will say on Thursday that "when couples hit a rocky patch, a bit of help and support can stop it spiralling out of control". He will instruct GPs to follow new guidance which says that if relationship problems are causing depression, up to 20 sessions of couples counselling can be offered, over the course of six months. Currently, most people seeking help from services like Relate pay between £45 and £60 per session, meaning the free counselling packages will be worth around £1,000 per couple. The NHS is expected to pay existing marriage guidance services, and newly-trained counsellors to provide the therapy.

Doctors and patients groups last night attacked the recommendation, contained in guidance by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE has repeatedly come under fire for decisions to reject life-extending drugs for cancer and treatment to reduce symptoms of dementia.

On Thursday, NICE was accused by charities of "condemning patients" to an early death by rejecting the use of Nexavar, a drug which can extend the lives of liver cancer, arguing that its £9 million annual cost – £3,000 a month per patient – could not be justified.

Nick James, professor of clinical oncology at the Cancer Research UK Institute for Cancer Studies said: "I am horrified, in particular because of the way these decisions are taken without public debate. "I think most people would say treatment for those who are sick with cancer should be top of our list, and I would really question whether these kinds of efforts to preserve marriages are a matter for the state."

NICE has previously restricted the use of drugs to limit the effects of Alzheimer's, costing £2 a day, while provoking further controversy in May when it ruled in favour of alternative therapies like acupuncture for back pain, despite admitting there was little evidence they worked.

Michael Summers, Vice-President of the Patients Association, urged NICE and the Government to "get their priorities right". "If we had the luxury of untold sums of money, maybe we would think about paying for couples counselling," he said. "As things stand, people are still waiting for urgent treatment, being denied drugs for cancer, and dementia, and it seems inappropriate at the very least to start using public money in this way".

SOURCE



Can British schools be freed from the ruinous grip of the British government?

Ed Balls doesn't understand that the best engine for raising standards is not ministerial diktat, but the devolution of power to parents, says Matthew d'Ancona

Michael Gove is famous within and outside the Palace of Westminster as a man you want on your side in a quiz: so much so that he sets the questions for his fellow Tory MPs when they want to test their general knowledge. So Ed Balls was taking a serious risk in the Queen's Speech debate on Thursday when he challenged the Shadow Schools Secretary to answer a GCSE question. "Explain how a fluoride atom can change into a fluoride ion," Mr Balls raged across the Dispatch Box – an unsettling mix of Magnus Magnusson and Jake LaMotta. Did he mean "fluorine"? No matter – this was never going to fox Mr Gove, who was obviously paying attention in the lab at Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen. "We all know that atoms, whether fluoride or otherwise, are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons," he said. "The way to transform an atom into an ion is by adding or taking away an electron."

Let the scores on the doors show that the Shadow Schools Secretary won that particular round. What is certain is that there are many more such rounds to come in this particular battle. The next general election will probably be dominated by three issues: economic competence; change versus experience; and whether the public can stand another four years of Gordon Brown (a question which, sadly for the Prime Minister, rather answers itself). But if one is looking for an area of policy that truly showcases the difference between Labour and the Conservatives, the resilient distinction between Left and Right, it is education.

In the schools Bill announced in the Queen's Speech, Mr Balls proposes a host of "pupil guarantees", "parent guarantees" and new powers for local authorities and the Secretary of State "to intervene to raise standards in schools". It is a centraliser's charter. As the Lib Dems' education spokesman, David Laws, said on Thursday, recalling Douglas Jay's famous dictum: "There is no better version of the man in Whitehall and Westminster who thinks that he knows best than the Secretary of State."

It was Nye Bevan's ambition "to be able to hear the clatter of the bedpan on the hospital ward, in the office of the minister": Mr Balls, for his part, wants to be able hear the squeak of the marker pen on the classroom whiteboard.

And, to be fair, the Schools Secretary is that most rare of creatures: an honest centraliser. "If we simply leave it to local decision-making," he asked on Thursday "or, as we know from the Conservatives, basically opting out entirely from the national curriculum of the state system and having a much more market-based free-for-all, it might work for some children, but how can we guarantee that a child from a particularly disadvantaged background, whose parents may be less engaged, will get the necessary support? How can we make sure that we deliver social justice in that way?"

There is something both extraordinary and pathetic in a Government as arthritic, broke and impotent as this one suddenly issuing an inventory of "guarantees": promissory notes to future generations. It is true that guarantees do not cost anything, and therefore have a specious appeal to ministers at a time of fiscal tightening. But that's about it. The idea that central prescription can end this country's educational crisis has been tested to destruction. Pledges, targets, a tidal wave of bureaucracy: in many cases, all this prodding and poking from Whitehall has ended up compounding the problem. This is the 12th education Bill to be published in 12 years of New Labour: indeed, little more than a week has passed since the parliamentary debate concluded on the last one (the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009).

The instinct of the Left is to offer "guarantees" policed by the state. The instinct of the Right is – or should be – to champion freedoms. The Cameroons have embraced a fundamental principle of public service reform that became apparent to Tony Blair only in his last years as Prime Minister and has never been accepted by Brown: namely, that the best engine for raising standards is not ministerial fiat or Whitehall diktat, but the devolution of power to parents, governors and head teachers.

Mr Gove and his colleagues do not espouse the educational "free market" of Mr Balls's caricature. Rather, they claim, with good reason, that public services thrive when institutions are localised and as close to autonomous as possible: not branches of a homogeneous national system but the outcrop of each local community. This is the lesson of modern education reform, from the transformation of schools in East Harlem to the grant-maintained sector in this country during the last Tory government and the independent state schools in Sweden that are the direct inspiration of the reforms proposed by Messrs Cameron and Gove. When schools are set free, they prosper: only a few weeks ago, Harris City Academy in Crystal Palace became the first school to receive a perfect Ofsted score under the new system of inspections. Before this school became an academy, 90 per cent of its pupils failed to get five decent GCSEs.

If there is such a thing as Cameronism, it is based on an essentially optimistic view of human nature: citizens will step up to the plate, businessmen will get behind local schools, parents will become involved. This is a sharp contrast to the Left-wing pessimism embodied by the Schools Secretary: the insistence that only Whitehall and town hall can ensure educational success and social justice, that big government is the only force that stands between our children and brutish anarchy.

I know which philosophy I prefer. But I also hope that the Cameroons embark upon their reform of schools with clear sight and one eye on the lessons of history. As Kenneth Clarke and John Patten can attest, the education establishment is a vicious beast when provoked: the local education authorities, teaching unions and their allies in the schools department will do anything in their power to scupper any reform that redistributes power and threatens vested interests. Parents will be misinformed at the council taxpayer's expense. There will be strike threats, warnings of turmoil in the classroom, the risk that children will be sent home.

The recoil will be swift and ferocious. That, of course, should encourage the Cameroons and reassure them that what they are doing is real and worthwhile, rather than cosmetic. It follows that they will require serious nerve and adamantine political will as much as the right ideas. Mr Gove certainly knows his ions. But, as he well knows, the challenges ahead will test much more than his grasp of chemistry.

SOURCE



Water doesn't improve your skin, scientists say

Aside from having good genes, the one surefire way of having good skin late in life is to be born and bred in a foggy climate where you rarely see the sun -- as in England. English women look 20 years younger than they are to Australian eyes and women from sunny Australia look prematurely aged to the English

Drinking lots of water doesn't give you a clearer complexion, according to scientists who now claim fruit and vegetables are the key to good skin. The findings are contrary to the advice that has been followed by many women, including Hollywood actresses and catwalk models, for many years.

The British Nutrition Foundation has claimed that a balanced diet and sunscreen are much more effective at keeping skin looking plump and young. Its Food For Skin report highlights a lack of any robust studies backing up the popular advice that water makes the complexion glow.

Report author, Heather Yuregir, said: “Just drinking water for the sake of drinking water really has no effect on improving the appearance of skin. It is just a common misconception.”

Vitamins A, B, C and E contained in a range of fruit and vegetables are all crucial for keeping the skin cells healthy. Not eating enough of them can result in problems such as scurvy, dermatitis or dry, scaly skin.

However, the report highlights that drinking plenty of water is still essential to good health. Smoking and exposure to the sun are what ages skin the most. Mrs Yuregir said: “Fruit and veg can keep your skin functioning as it should and keep it looking healthy. “And sun cream is really recommended to prevent the signs of ageing because the majority of the signs of ageing that appear on the skin are caused by sun damage.”

SOURCE



Another British foot-shooter

We read:

"Ben Elton has been forced to apologise for his royal rant on Good News Week which enraged Brits this week. The comedian and writer's opinions on the monarchy, British sporting prowess and more have disgusted the British and led to several newspapers - including the Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Sun - running outraged stories about his comments on the comedy show.

Displaying his vitriolic wit and sarcasm on the comedy show, Elton made a series of comments regarding the UK, calling the Queen "a sad little old lady", Prince Philip a "mad old bigot", joking about sex with Margaret Thatcher and saying Prince Charles was just a "disillusioned ex-hippy".

He said London had scored the 2012 Olympics in order to give Britons some chance at sporting success and because the rest of the world felt sorry for the British when it came to athletic prowess, and launched a royal rant against the Queen calling her "a sad little old lady who lives in state sponsored accommodation". On sex with Thatcher he said: "She sort of annoyed me because she would always want to smoke afterwards and I hated that because that was so dirty".

Source

He obviously does not want most Brits to watch his shows or buy his books -- because many won't after this.





22 November, 2009

Another Vast Jewish Conspiracy

British media and society are gripped by lies about a "secret" Israel lobby controlling foreign policy. Why such nonsense? The article below does not tell us. So let me mention one thing: The presence of Jews such as the Miliband brothers in prominent positions in the British government does feed such paranoia. Jewish prominence in all walks of life has of course long been common in any country where there are Jews but the holocaust should remind us that this provokes destructive envy. Yet seeking such prominence seems to be very Jewish. It is of course unfair but if the remarkable Miliband duo had the interests of their fellow Jews at heart, they would retire from public life -- but I suspect that is not in their genes to do so. If Jews valued their survival as they should, they would all try to lead entirely private lives -- but the lesson of history appears to be that that is not going to happen. Yet it is perfectly possible to lead a full and happy life in obscurity. Many do. I myself repeatedly turn away opportunities for personal publicity. Personal relationships and writing a few small things on the net keep me perfectly happy. As a brilliant Jewish Rabbi once said: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5). And if you look about you, you will see that they are. There are very few Jews among the 6 billion people of the world

Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.

The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide." The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.

In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper's flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group's virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a "Protocols of Zion"-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.

Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain. Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark documentary, "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby," on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran's Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.

The makers of the documentary —top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors' own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power. It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.

"The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza," they wrote. "We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it 'strives to protect innocent life.' This remark was not intended satirically."

Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.

If you think this all sounds familiar, you'd be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" —another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.

But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.

It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. One of them, Poju Zabludowicz, the billionaire funder of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is good friends with Madonna —not exactly the kind of company you'd choose if you were trying to hide behind a veil of obscurity.

Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment's reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.

Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4's widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby's "seditious behavior," its "disgusting attack on British democracy," "the hand of global Zionism at work," and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: "We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out."

If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.

Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel's defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.

Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel —already a small and diminishing group in Britain— will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the "Lobby." Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.

SOURCE



Reports critical of major British public hospital over child abuse

Whistleblower fired rather than heeded. "Rocking the boat" is the one unforgiveable sin in a bureaucracy. Too bad about the patients

Great Ormond Street Hospital failed to answer senior doctors’ justified concerns about the clinic which failed Baby P [who died of abuse from his carers], according to two secret reports. The hospital provided the doctors at the Haringey child protection clinic where Baby P was a patient, and was the “lead agency” for child abuse, running the clinic with Haringey Primary Care Trust.

The reports, seen by The Daily Telegraph, say that child safety at the clinic was a matter for “grave concern” and that Great Ormond Street managers failed to act adequately on “significant problems” identified by the most senior doctors at the clinic more than a year before Baby P’s death. Instead, the “most vocal” was removed from her job, they say. There was inadequate staffing at the clinic, and “the workload of the consultant team was excessive”.

One doctor, Michelle Zalkin, told the investigators that Great Ormond Street and Haringey managers created a “very hostile environment” which became “quite unbearable”. They communicated, she claimed, largely by “shouty emails and Post-it notes”.

In April 2006, the four most senior consultants at the clinic wrote a joint letter to managers warning of the “very high risk” of a tragedy without more staff. They said their concerns had been “trivialised”. Some action was taken, the reports say, but staffing was cut further and Dr Kim Holt, the consultant identified as “the most vocal,” complained of being “targeted” by managers. She was removed from her job and remains on “special leave” on full pay. Two other consultants resigned and the fourth, Dr Sukanta Banerjee, went off sick, though she has since returned.

By the time Baby P, identified as Peter Connolly, came to the clinic in 2007, there were no experienced consultants and he was seen by a locum, Dr Sabah al-Zayyat, who missed his broken back. Two days later, the 17 month-old was found dead in his cot with broken ribs, lacerations to his head, a finger tip missing, broken teeth, and scores of bruises.

One of the reports, commissioned by NHS London, the strategic health authority, into Dr Holt’s case, finds the consultants’ concerns were “genuine and well-founded”. It is a conclusion echoed by the other report, by Prof Jo Sibert and Dr Deborah Hodes, experts in child protection, into the appointment of Dr al-Zayyat.

The NHS London report says the concerns were “taken seriously” and some action followed but there was “no evidence” that the main worry, consultants’ workload, was “adequately addressed”. The number of consultant posts was reduced after the complaints, from four to three. Since Baby P, it has been increased to nine posts.

The report says the Great Ormond Street manager responsible for the clinic, David Elliman, claimed the problems did not affect patient safety. “We would not agree,” the investigators say. They describe Dr Holt as “highly committed” and say: “We do not consider Dr Holt has been directly targeted, but we do consider that she is entitled to feel aggrieved.”

Dr Holt, who has lodged a formal grievance against Great Ormond Street, refused to comment. A hospital spokesman denied victimisation and said they were keen to resolve any issues with her amicably but could not comment further.

SOURCE



British children get legal right to good education

Children will be legally guaranteed the right to a good education under new legislation that teachers fear will descend into a “whingers’ [whiner's] charter”. An education Bill to be unveiled will create a set of pupil and parent “guarantees” for the first time – outlining what families can expect from the state school system in England. This includes one-to-one tuition for pupils struggling in the basics, five hours of PE every week, the right to “high quality” cultural activities and a promise that all schools will promote healthy eating, active lifestyles and mental wellbeing. [And provide free apple pie, no doubt]

In a hugely contentious move, parents will be able to complain directly the Local Government Ombudsman if schools and councils fail to meet the guarantees. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has already admitted that mothers and fathers could eventually take schools to court as a “last resort”. It prompted claims from head teachers’ leaders that the proposals would turn into a “whingers’ charter” and open the door to litigation. The Association of School and College Leaders also warned that the laws risked creating one of the most “centrally prescriptive” education systems in the world – stifling innovation.

Labour wants many of the new “guarantees” to be introduced by September next year, suggesting ministers will attempt to push the proposed legislation through Parliament before the forthcoming General Election.

John Dunford, ASCL general secretary, said the plans would put many head teachers’ jobs “on the line”. “Raising so many aspects of education to the status of a ‘guarantee’ will have the effect of making everything quasi-statutory. It will take statute into realms it has never previously covered,” he said. “Instead of the increasingly diverse system that the government has often said that it wants to encourage, England will have one of the most centrally prescriptive systems in the world. Researchers have stated that English heads are among the most autonomous; these ‘guarantees’ tell a very different story.

“School leaders are extremely concerned that these ‘guarantees’ will turn into a whingers’ charter for the more litigious parents to complain, first to the head, then to the governors, then to the Local Government Ombudsman service... This will create an immense amount of work for school leaders, who are currently trying, with government encouragement, to create more productive relationships with parents.”

Labour’s education Bill will set out 23 guarantees for pupils and 15 for parents that must be met. The pupils’ charter will say all primary and secondary pupils should have the “opportunity to have their say about standards of behaviour in their school” from spring 2010. Children identified as gifted and talented should have written confirmation of the extra work they need to ensure they are stretched and every pupil should eventually have the right to five hours of “cultural activities” in or out of school every week, including visits to libraries, museums and performing arts centres. Children over 11 will have a personal tutor to ensure “any learning needs or issues are quickly addressed”, while teenagers will be legally entitled to study one of the Government’s new diploma qualifications.

Under the guarantee, parents will have the right to demand information about their child's performance and overall school standards and regular face-to-face meetings with designated teachers. By 2010, they are expected to have access to a range of additional services including “information and support on parenting skills”.

Mothers and fathers can complain to head teachers if they believe schools are failing to meet the pledge. Complaints are then referred to the local authority and ultimately the Local Government Ombudsman. Mr Balls has previously admitted that – if these avenues fail to provide a resolution – a parent could take a school to court in the form of a judicial review.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "It's absolutely right that parents are given concrete guarantees of clear discipline; close contact with teachers; intensive catch-up classes if their children are falling behind; and education and training for all 16 and 17-year-olds. "This is not telling schools to reinvent the wheel - they should already be doing this. This is about setting out in law what pupils and parents should expect from their schools and making sure that happens wherever they are in the country. "This simply will not lead to a flood of court cases against schools. There will be a clear process so teachers, heads, governing bodies and local authorities can deal with any complaint - as they already do with the vast majority of issues. "If they do not, we've now given the Local Government Ombudsman powers to hear parents' complaints and recommend that schools take remedial action. If they still will not, the Secretary of State will be able to intervene and direct schools to act."

Nick Gibb, the Tory shadow schools minister, said: “Ed Balls’s plan to see head teachers in court defending themselves against parents is expensive, time-consuming and completely misses the point about giving parents more control over their child’s education. “Far from a system of legal guarantees which would allow mainly wealthier parents to take schools to court, what we need is to give parents a genuine choice by opening up the system.”

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat children's spokesman, said: "Only an arch centraliser like Ed Balls could believe that the only way to empower parents and pupils would be to create a vast bureaucratic structure of 'rights' without the means to deliver them. "Instead of giving real freedom and rights to pupils, parents and schools, Ed Balls' proposals are likely to prove a license for litigation and will raise expectations without creating a mechanism to raise standards."

SOURCE



Floods hit UK as nation suffers heaviest rain on record

Warmists assured us for years that global warming would bring drought, so this proves ...?

The full and devastating impact of England's worst recorded day of rain was still emerging today as tributes were paid to a policeman swept away by floodwaters while trying to save others. PC Bill Barker was helping motorists stranded on a bridge over the Derwent in the Cumbrian town of Workington when it collapsed. His body was discovered hours later on a nearby beach.

The Environment Agency said that the flooding across the region was so severe that such an event was likely to happen once in 1000 years. The rainfall, on to an already saturated terrain, was the highest level measured in England since records began.

Meteorologists recorded 314mm of rain in 24 hours and flood warnings remained in place across the North West of England, parts of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The bridge from which PC Barker fell to his death was one of at least four to be washed away. Cumbria County Council issued a warning to motorists and pedestrians to avoid using such crossings as they could be extremely dangerous. Hundreds of homes and businesses were evacuated, many of them ruined by floodwater and mud.

Emergency services continued to rescue those still trapped overnight. They urged anyone who had gone to see the destruction for themselves to leave because their vehicles were blocking roads and hampering efforts to reach the worst-hit areas.

The rescue operation continued overnight in Cockermouth, the town worst hit by the flooding, with people being winched to safety. The two rivers that run through the town burst their banks, blocking roads and forcing more than 200 people to be helped to safety.

SOURCE



Hadley hacked: warmist conspiracy exposed?

Andrew Bolt below digs in to the deliberate fraud exposed in the released emails from Britain's premier climate "science" organization. The post is a long one so I reproduce only the opening blast below. I have however also posted a copy of the whole thing here, "just in case"

8.15 PM UPDATE: The Hadley CRU director admits the emails seem to be genuine:

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight ..."It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."…

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle. Not surprising, then, that Steve McIntyre reports:

Earlier today, CRU cancelled all existing passwords. Actions speaking loudly.

But back to the original post - and the most astonishing of the emails so far…

***************

Hackers have broken into the database of the Hadley GRU unit - one of the world’s leading alarmist centres - and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.

The ethics of this are dubious, to say the least. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion - sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.

A warning, of course. We can only say with a 90 per cent confidence interval that these emails are real.

(ALTERNATIVE link to the files. And another link.)

UPDATE

Ethics alert! (my bolding - and I’ve update this post with the full alleged email, now):

From: Phil Jones

To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX

Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement

Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX

School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX

University of East Anglia

Norwich .

Nice. This could be fun.

UPDATE 2

Surely these emails can’t be genuine. Surely the world’s most prominent alarmist scientists aren’t secretly exchanging emails like this, admitting privately they can’t find the warming they’ve been so loudly predicting?:

From: Kevin TrenberthTo: Michael MannSubject: Re: BBC U-turn on climateDate: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)***

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

This has to be a forgery, surely. Because if it isn’t, we’re about to see the unpicking of a huge scandal. I mean, the media will follow this up, right? In the meantime, use with care.

Much more here



Welfare in Britain: how help becomes a hindrance

With the shift of emphasis from welfare to wellbeing, the state reinforces the sense that we are unable to cope with life

Writing in the Guardian recently, Madeleine Bunting argued that bankers and benefit claimants have one thing in common: ‘their capacity to provoke popular resentment’.

Certainly, the welfare state, and the dependent status that comes with it, has long been regarded by its critics as the cause of everything that is going wrong in society. It is blamed for the breakdown of community; it is blamed for the various deprivations and depravities associated with the creation of a dependent underclass, from anti-social behaviour to child abuse. It is even blamed for the failing UK economy, for unsustainable public spending, ‘hidden’ unemployment and negative growth. Yet, for all that the welfare state finds itself falsely accused of a multitude of problems, the charge of welfare dependency is fairly levelled.

While there are only 800,000 official job seekers, more than 2.5million are claiming incapacity benefit, and hundreds of thousands more are reliant on housing benefit and income support, amongst other things. In all, there are nearly five million people out of work and claiming benefits at the moment. What is perplexing is that for all the concern about public spending levels – particularly on welfare – critics do not oppose the retention of this ‘safety net’.

Instead, the question asked of this safety net is how big it should be and how far it should be cast? It is pretty clear, for instance, that the state should be stepping in right now to address the immediate needs of those most affected by the recession. But in other areas of life, especially people’s interior lives, their emotions and feelings, state intervention is far less helpful.

Take, for example, a recent report by the Mental Health Foundation. Here it is argued that the economic downturn is having an ‘adverse effect on the nation’s wellbeing’. This shift, from focusing on people’s welfare to attending to their wellbeing, brings problems of its own. The use of this term today tends to justify a more intrusive and extensive role for the state: through its appointed experts, the state can effectively manage people’s lives for them. And in doing so it assumes that people in general lack the resources to cope with life.

On all sides of the debate there is a failure to grasp just how profound this shift has already been, and how ingrained in the wider culture the problem of dependency has become. Beyond the confines of the welfare state, the micro-politics of lifestyle and therapy, ostensibly aimed at promoting our wellbeing, are in fact making us all dependent on the intervention of third parties.

‘People can’t cope’ is the underlying assumption. Hence a ‘surge in children taken into care’ is blamed on the recession, because (we are told) it is ‘inevitable’ that as people get poorer they smack their kids, suffer breakdowns, and turn to drugs and alcohol. It is acknowledged almost as an afterthought that the headline-grabbing child abuse case of Baby P (see Fixing ‘Broken Britain’?, by David Clements) may also have had something to do with this. In a similar vein, the Audit Commission has warned that local authorities need to be prepared for the ‘surge in social problems such as addiction, alcoholism and domestic violence’ that we can expect as a consequence of the ‘second wave’ of the recession.

This concern with people’s potentially troubling behaviour, about the risks they face and about their emotional and relationship needs, is unsurprisingly having an impact on welfare policy. All the political parties claim to support ‘radical’ welfare reform and issue statements about imposing tougher conditions on the workless.

The Tories, for example, say they want to protect us from ‘stifling’ big government and to end ‘state control over the lives of individuals’. But like New Labour, they still understand the lot of benefit claimants in terms of people’s needs and personal inadequacies; that is, they lack self-esteem or self-confidence. This is rather different to the traditional Tory view that the workless are lazy, bone-idle or work-shy. There is nobody telling the jobless to get on their bikes anymore, as old Tory warhorse Norman – now Lord – Tebbit once did. The new Tories might want to go along with Tebbit, but only so long as the stabilisers are left on.

Like New Labour, the Tories will lead benefit claimants down the Pathway to Work, but never quite let go. So even after a job-seeker has succeeded in getting a job, there will be ‘sustained mentoring and development advice’ from the touchy-feely Tories. Today’s official interest in the minutiae of our lives does not look like ending with the demise of New Labour; it is set to continue under David Cameron’s Tories.

So, instead of telling people that they should get married because that’s the right thing to do, a Cameron government would offer couples ‘relationship counselling at critical moments in their lives’. As if to demonstrate he has no political convictions one way or the other, self-styled ‘Red Tory’ Phillip Blond says he doesn’t object to lone parents because they are lone parents. Rather he objects to them because their children do badly at school, or get addicted to drugs and alcohol, or go on to commit crimes when they get older. Similarly, right-wing journalist, former banker and critic of the welfare state, James Bartholomew, claims that it is the damage done to children rather than the fact that they’re born out of wedlock, that he finds so objectionable.

The belief that the welfare state is to blame for Britain’s problems draws on a profound sense of people’s inability to run their own lives. If anything, the critics of the welfare state underestimate the problem of dependency by failing to recognise just how pervasive is this view of people’s incapacity. Dependency is not about the feckless few, it runs much deeper than that.

If we are to defend welfare, we need to work out how it can be a help and not a hindrance, a boost rather than a burden. Whatever the merits of the welfare state, the postwar optimism that inspired it is long gone. It is only when we challenge the pessimism of our own age, and the notion that people are essentially vulnerable, helpless and not to be trusted, rather than robust, resourceful and autonomous, that we will regain our independence.

SOURCE







Must not express a preference for Anglo names

Even in the British Conservative party

"A former Tory Parliamentary candidate was suspended by the party last night after complaining that people bidding to become an MP did not have ‘normal’ English names. Councillor Peter Hobbins is accused of sending racist emails to colleagues attacking the list of prospective Parliamentary candidates for the Orpington seat in Kent.

Mr Hobbins, who stood unsuccessfully for the Tories at the 2001 election and was shortlisted for the London mayoral race, suggested he should change his name to ‘Petrado’ to succeed in the party. One email said: ‘I have been contacted by a Mr Dilon Gumraj and a Zerha Zaidi and others who are all on the approved Conservative Parliamentary Candidates list. ‘Not one of them has a ‘normal’ English name.

‘Why are the Candidates Department so keen on these foreign names?!!!! Maybe I should change my name to something foreign – how does Petrado Indiano Hobbinso sound to you?!’

Mr Hobbins also said he was fed up with reading about ‘Africa’ on the CVs of would-be candidates.

A Tory spokesman said: ‘Councillor Hobbins has been immediately suspended from the Conservative Party and from the Conservative Group on Bromley council and he will play no part in the selection of the Parliamentary candidate. There is no room for racism in the Conservative Party.’

Source

Welfare without the state: "Although the rise of government welfare has had a similar impact on US private welfare as in the UK, the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) has survived the onslaught and is insightful in considering how private welfare can function outside of the state. Members of the church fund the program; on the first Sunday of every month everyone skips two meals and donates the saving from those meals. If a member loses income, becomes unemployed, etc. they meet with their local leader and together they determine the needs of that individual or family, and assistance is given accordingly.”

UK: Common sense isn’t common anymore: "The more a government legislates on our day to day activities, the less we take ownership of those activities ourselves. We begin to lose the ability of self-determination in our responsibilities, and as a consequence we have nothing else to fall back on apart from the rigid framework of state diktat. The disempowerment suffered by individuals under the thumb of the state leads to a stupefaction of social intercourse, and a learned helplessness that infects an ever increasing number of our daily interactions. These observations do not lead me to a negative conclusion in regards to the human condition and our potential for creating autonomous order in a stateless society. Far from it, the same human characteristics that lead to seemingly defeatist and subservient social patterns, are the very characteristics that will enable our liberation from this malaise.”





21 November, 2009

Another Vast Jewish Conspiracy

British media and society are gripped by lies about a "secret" Israel lobby controlling foreign policy. Why such nonsense? The article below does not tell us. So let me mention one thing: The presence of Jews such as the Miliband brothers in prominent positions in the British government does feed such paranoia. Jewish prominence in all walks of life has of course long been common in any country where there are Jews but the holocaust should remind us that this provokes destructive envy. Yet seeking such prominence seems to be very Jewish. It is of course unfair but if the remarkable Miliband duo had the interests of their fellow Jews at heart, they would retire from public life -- but I suspect that is not in their genes to do so. If Jews valued their survival as they should, they would all try to lead entirely private lives -- but the lesson of history appears to be that that is not going to happen. Yet it is perfectly possible to lead a full and happy life in obscurity. Many do. I myself repeatedly turn away opportunities for personal publicity. Personal relationships and writing a few small things on the net keep me perfectly happy. As a brilliant Jewish Rabbi once said: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5). And if you look about you, you will see that they are. There are very few Jews among the 6 billion people of the world

Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.

The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide." The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.

In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper's flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group's virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a "Protocols of Zion"-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.

Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain. Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark documentary, "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby," on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran's Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.

The makers of the documentary —top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors' own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power. It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.

"The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza," they wrote. "We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it 'strives to protect innocent life.' This remark was not intended satirically."

Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.

If you think this all sounds familiar, you'd be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" —another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.

But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.

It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. One of them, Poju Zabludowicz, the billionaire funder of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is good friends with Madonna —not exactly the kind of company you'd choose if you were trying to hide behind a veil of obscurity.

Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment's reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.

Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4's widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby's "seditious behavior," its "disgusting attack on British democracy," "the hand of global Zionism at work," and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: "We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out."

If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.

Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel's defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.

Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel —already a small and diminishing group in Britain— will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the "Lobby." Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.

SOURCE



Reports critical of major British public hospital over child abuse

Whistleblower fired rather than heeded. "Rocking the boat" is the one unforgiveable sin in a bureaucracy. Too bad about the patients

Great Ormond Street Hospital failed to answer senior doctors’ justified concerns about the clinic which failed Baby P [who died of abuse from his carers], according to two secret reports. The hospital provided the doctors at the Haringey child protection clinic where Baby P was a patient, and was the “lead agency” for child abuse, running the clinic with Haringey Primary Care Trust.

The reports, seen by The Daily Telegraph, say that child safety at the clinic was a matter for “grave concern” and that Great Ormond Street managers failed to act adequately on “significant problems” identified by the most senior doctors at the clinic more than a year before Baby P’s death. Instead, the “most vocal” was removed from her job, they say. There was inadequate staffing at the clinic, and “the workload of the consultant team was excessive”.

One doctor, Michelle Zalkin, told the investigators that Great Ormond Street and Haringey managers created a “very hostile environment” which became “quite unbearable”. They communicated, she claimed, largely by “shouty emails and Post-it notes”.

In April 2006, the four most senior consultants at the clinic wrote a joint letter to managers warning of the “very high risk” of a tragedy without more staff. They said their concerns had been “trivialised”. Some action was taken, the reports say, but staffing was cut further and Dr Kim Holt, the consultant identified as “the most vocal,” complained of being “targeted” by managers. She was removed from her job and remains on “special leave” on full pay. Two other consultants resigned and the fourth, Dr Sukanta Banerjee, went off sick, though she has since returned.

By the time Baby P, identified as Peter Connolly, came to the clinic in 2007, there were no experienced consultants and he was seen by a locum, Dr Sabah al-Zayyat, who missed his broken back. Two days later, the 17 month-old was found dead in his cot with broken ribs, lacerations to his head, a finger tip missing, broken teeth, and scores of bruises.

One of the reports, commissioned by NHS London, the strategic health authority, into Dr Holt’s case, finds the consultants’ concerns were “genuine and well-founded”. It is a conclusion echoed by the other report, by Prof Jo Sibert and Dr Deborah Hodes, experts in child protection, into the appointment of Dr al-Zayyat.

The NHS London report says the concerns were “taken seriously” and some action followed but there was “no evidence” that the main worry, consultants’ workload, was “adequately addressed”. The number of consultant posts was reduced after the complaints, from four to three. Since Baby P, it has been increased to nine posts.

The report says the Great Ormond Street manager responsible for the clinic, David Elliman, claimed the problems did not affect patient safety. “We would not agree,” the investigators say. They describe Dr Holt as “highly committed” and say: “We do not consider Dr Holt has been directly targeted, but we do consider that she is entitled to feel aggrieved.”

Dr Holt, who has lodged a formal grievance against Great Ormond Street, refused to comment. A hospital spokesman denied victimisation and said they were keen to resolve any issues with her amicably but could not comment further.

SOURCE



British children get legal right to good education

Children will be legally guaranteed the right to a good education under new legislation that teachers fear will descend into a “whingers’ [whiner's] charter”. An education Bill to be unveiled will create a set of pupil and parent “guarantees” for the first time – outlining what families can expect from the state school system in England. This includes one-to-one tuition for pupils struggling in the basics, five hours of PE every week, the right to “high quality” cultural activities and a promise that all schools will promote healthy eating, active lifestyles and mental wellbeing. [And provide free apple pie, no doubt]

In a hugely contentious move, parents will be able to complain directly the Local Government Ombudsman if schools and councils fail to meet the guarantees. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has already admitted that mothers and fathers could eventually take schools to court as a “last resort”. It prompted claims from head teachers’ leaders that the proposals would turn into a “whingers’ charter” and open the door to litigation. The Association of School and College Leaders also warned that the laws risked creating one of the most “centrally prescriptive” education systems in the world – stifling innovation.

Labour wants many of the new “guarantees” to be introduced by September next year, suggesting ministers will attempt to push the proposed legislation through Parliament before the forthcoming General Election.

John Dunford, ASCL general secretary, said the plans would put many head teachers’ jobs “on the line”. “Raising so many aspects of education to the status of a ‘guarantee’ will have the effect of making everything quasi-statutory. It will take statute into realms it has never previously covered,” he said. “Instead of the increasingly diverse system that the government has often said that it wants to encourage, England will have one of the most centrally prescriptive systems in the world. Researchers have stated that English heads are among the most autonomous; these ‘guarantees’ tell a very different story.

“School leaders are extremely concerned that these ‘guarantees’ will turn into a whingers’ charter for the more litigious parents to complain, first to the head, then to the governors, then to the Local Government Ombudsman service... This will create an immense amount of work for school leaders, who are currently trying, with government encouragement, to create more productive relationships with parents.”

Labour’s education Bill will set out 23 guarantees for pupils and 15 for parents that must be met. The pupils’ charter will say all primary and secondary pupils should have the “opportunity to have their say about standards of behaviour in their school” from spring 2010. Children identified as gifted and talented should have written confirmation of the extra work they need to ensure they are stretched and every pupil should eventually have the right to five hours of “cultural activities” in or out of school every week, including visits to libraries, museums and performing arts centres. Children over 11 will have a personal tutor to ensure “any learning needs or issues are quickly addressed”, while teenagers will be legally entitled to study one of the Government’s new diploma qualifications.

Under the guarantee, parents will have the right to demand information about their child's performance and overall school standards and regular face-to-face meetings with designated teachers. By 2010, they are expected to have access to a range of additional services including “information and support on parenting skills”.

Mothers and fathers can complain to head teachers if they believe schools are failing to meet the pledge. Complaints are then referred to the local authority and ultimately the Local Government Ombudsman. Mr Balls has previously admitted that – if these avenues fail to provide a resolution – a parent could take a school to court in the form of a judicial review.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "It's absolutely right that parents are given concrete guarantees of clear discipline; close contact with teachers; intensive catch-up classes if their children are falling behind; and education and training for all 16 and 17-year-olds. "This is not telling schools to reinvent the wheel - they should already be doing this. This is about setting out in law what pupils and parents should expect from their schools and making sure that happens wherever they are in the country. "This simply will not lead to a flood of court cases against schools. There will be a clear process so teachers, heads, governing bodies and local authorities can deal with any complaint - as they already do with the vast majority of issues. "If they do not, we've now given the Local Government Ombudsman powers to hear parents' complaints and recommend that schools take remedial action. If they still will not, the Secretary of State will be able to intervene and direct schools to act."

Nick Gibb, the Tory shadow schools minister, said: “Ed Balls’s plan to see head teachers in court defending themselves against parents is expensive, time-consuming and completely misses the point about giving parents more control over their child’s education. “Far from a system of legal guarantees which would allow mainly wealthier parents to take schools to court, what we need is to give parents a genuine choice by opening up the system.”

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat children's spokesman, said: "Only an arch centraliser like Ed Balls could believe that the only way to empower parents and pupils would be to create a vast bureaucratic structure of 'rights' without the means to deliver them. "Instead of giving real freedom and rights to pupils, parents and schools, Ed Balls' proposals are likely to prove a license for litigation and will raise expectations without creating a mechanism to raise standards."

SOURCE



Floods hit UK as nation suffers heaviest rain on record

Warmists assured us for years that global warming would bring drought, so this proves ...?

The full and devastating impact of England's worst recorded day of rain was still emerging today as tributes were paid to a policeman swept away by floodwaters while trying to save others. PC Bill Barker was helping motorists stranded on a bridge over the Derwent in the Cumbrian town of Workington when it collapsed. His body was discovered hours later on a nearby beach.

The Environment Agency said that the flooding across the region was so severe that such an event was likely to happen once in 1000 years. The rainfall, on to an already saturated terrain, was the highest level measured in England since records began.

Meteorologists recorded 314mm of rain in 24 hours and flood warnings remained in place across the North West of England, parts of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The bridge from which PC Barker fell to his death was one of at least four to be washed away. Cumbria County Council issued a warning to motorists and pedestrians to avoid using such crossings as they could be extremely dangerous. Hundreds of homes and businesses were evacuated, many of them ruined by floodwater and mud.

Emergency services continued to rescue those still trapped overnight. They urged anyone who had gone to see the destruction for themselves to leave because their vehicles were blocking roads and hampering efforts to reach the worst-hit areas.

The rescue operation continued overnight in Cockermouth, the town worst hit by the flooding, with people being winched to safety. The two rivers that run through the town burst their banks, blocking roads and forcing more than 200 people to be helped to safety.

SOURCE



Hadley hacked: warmist conspiracy exposed?

Andrew Bolt below digs in to the deliberate fraud exposed in the released emails from Britain's premier climate "science" organization. The post is a long one so I reproduce only the opening blast below. I have however also posted a copy of the whole thing here, "just in case"

8.15 PM UPDATE: The Hadley CRU director admits the emails seem to be genuine:

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight ..."It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."…

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle. Not surprising, then, that Steve McIntyre reports:

Earlier today, CRU cancelled all existing passwords. Actions speaking loudly.

But back to the original post - and the most astonishing of the emails so far…

***************

Hackers have broken into the database of the Hadley GRU unit - one of the world’s leading alarmist centres - and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.

The ethics of this are dubious, to say the least. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion - sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.

A warning, of course. We can only say with a 90 per cent confidence interval that these emails are real.

(ALTERNATIVE link to the files. And another link.)

UPDATE

Ethics alert! (my bolding - and I’ve update this post with the full alleged email, now):

From: Phil Jones

To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX

Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement

Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX

School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX

University of East Anglia

Norwich .

Nice. This could be fun.

UPDATE 2

Surely these emails can’t be genuine. Surely the world’s most prominent alarmist scientists aren’t secretly exchanging emails like this, admitting privately they can’t find the warming they’ve been so loudly predicting?:

From: Kevin TrenberthTo: Michael MannSubject: Re: BBC U-turn on climateDate: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)***

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

This has to be a forgery, surely. Because if it isn’t, we’re about to see the unpicking of a huge scandal. I mean, the media will follow this up, right? In the meantime, use with care.

Much more here



Welfare in Britain: how help becomes a hindrance

With the shift of emphasis from welfare to wellbeing, the state reinforces the sense that we are unable to cope with life

Writing in the Guardian recently, Madeleine Bunting argued that bankers and benefit claimants have one thing in common: ‘their capacity to provoke popular resentment’.

Certainly, the welfare state, and the dependent status that comes with it, has long been regarded by its critics as the cause of everything that is going wrong in society. It is blamed for the breakdown of community; it is blamed for the various deprivations and depravities associated with the creation of a dependent underclass, from anti-social behaviour to child abuse. It is even blamed for the failing UK economy, for unsustainable public spending, ‘hidden’ unemployment and negative growth. Yet, for all that the welfare state finds itself falsely accused of a multitude of problems, the charge of welfare dependency is fairly levelled.

While there are only 800,000 official job seekers, more than 2.5million are claiming incapacity benefit, and hundreds of thousands more are reliant on housing benefit and income support, amongst other things. In all, there are nearly five million people out of work and claiming benefits at the moment. What is perplexing is that for all the concern about public spending levels – particularly on welfare – critics do not oppose the retention of this ‘safety net’.

Instead, the question asked of this safety net is how big it should be and how far it should be cast? It is pretty clear, for instance, that the state should be stepping in right now to address the immediate needs of those most affected by the recession. But in other areas of life, especially people’s interior lives, their emotions and feelings, state intervention is far less helpful.

Take, for example, a recent report by the Mental Health Foundation. Here it is argued that the economic downturn is having an ‘adverse effect on the nation’s wellbeing’. This shift, from focusing on people’s welfare to attending to their wellbeing, brings problems of its own. The use of this term today tends to justify a more intrusive and extensive role for the state: through its appointed experts, the state can effectively manage people’s lives for them. And in doing so it assumes that people in general lack the resources to cope with life.

On all sides of the debate there is a failure to grasp just how profound this shift has already been, and how ingrained in the wider culture the problem of dependency has become. Beyond the confines of the welfare state, the micro-politics of lifestyle and therapy, ostensibly aimed at promoting our wellbeing, are in fact making us all dependent on the intervention of third parties.

‘People can’t cope’ is the underlying assumption. Hence a ‘surge in children taken into care’ is blamed on the recession, because (we are told) it is ‘inevitable’ that as people get poorer they smack their kids, suffer breakdowns, and turn to drugs and alcohol. It is acknowledged almost as an afterthought that the headline-grabbing child abuse case of Baby P (see Fixing ‘Broken Britain’?, by David Clements) may also have had something to do with this. In a similar vein, the Audit Commission has warned that local authorities need to be prepared for the ‘surge in social problems such as addiction, alcoholism and domestic violence’ that we can expect as a consequence of the ‘second wave’ of the recession.

This concern with people’s potentially troubling behaviour, about the risks they face and about their emotional and relationship needs, is unsurprisingly having an impact on welfare policy. All the political parties claim to support ‘radical’ welfare reform and issue statements about imposing tougher conditions on the workless.

The Tories, for example, say they want to protect us from ‘stifling’ big government and to end ‘state control over the lives of individuals’. But like New Labour, they still understand the lot of benefit claimants in terms of people’s needs and personal inadequacies; that is, they lack self-esteem or self-confidence. This is rather different to the traditional Tory view that the workless are lazy, bone-idle or work-shy. There is nobody telling the jobless to get on their bikes anymore, as old Tory warhorse Norman – now Lord – Tebbit once did. The new Tories might want to go along with Tebbit, but only so long as the stabilisers are left on.

Like New Labour, the Tories will lead benefit claimants down the Pathway to Work, but never quite let go. So even after a job-seeker has succeeded in getting a job, there will be ‘sustained mentoring and development advice’ from the touchy-feely Tories. Today’s official interest in the minutiae of our lives does not look like ending with the demise of New Labour; it is set to continue under David Cameron’s Tories.

So, instead of telling people that they should get married because that’s the right thing to do, a Cameron government would offer couples ‘relationship counselling at critical moments in their lives’. As if to demonstrate he has no political convictions one way or the other, self-styled ‘Red Tory’ Phillip Blond says he doesn’t object to lone parents because they are lone parents. Rather he objects to them because their children do badly at school, or get addicted to drugs and alcohol, or go on to commit crimes when they get older. Similarly, right-wing journalist, former banker and critic of the welfare state, James Bartholomew, claims that it is the damage done to children rather than the fact that they’re born out of wedlock, that he finds so objectionable.

The belief that the welfare state is to blame for Britain’s problems draws on a profound sense of people’s inability to run their own lives. If anything, the critics of the welfare state underestimate the problem of dependency by failing to recognise just how pervasive is this view of people’s incapacity. Dependency is not about the feckless few, it runs much deeper than that.

If we are to defend welfare, we need to work out how it can be a help and not a hindrance, a boost rather than a burden. Whatever the merits of the welfare state, the postwar optimism that inspired it is long gone. It is only when we challenge the pessimism of our own age, and the notion that people are essentially vulnerable, helpless and not to be trusted, rather than robust, resourceful and autonomous, that we will regain our independence.

SOURCE







Must not express a preference for Anglo names

Even in the British Conservative party

"A former Tory Parliamentary candidate was suspended by the party last night after complaining that people bidding to become an MP did not have ‘normal’ English names. Councillor Peter Hobbins is accused of sending racist emails to colleagues attacking the list of prospective Parliamentary candidates for the Orpington seat in Kent.

Mr Hobbins, who stood unsuccessfully for the Tories at the 2001 election and was shortlisted for the London mayoral race, suggested he should change his name to ‘Petrado’ to succeed in the party. One email said: ‘I have been contacted by a Mr Dilon Gumraj and a Zerha Zaidi and others who are all on the approved Conservative Parliamentary Candidates list. ‘Not one of them has a ‘normal’ English name.

‘Why are the Candidates Department so keen on these foreign names?!!!! Maybe I should change my name to something foreign – how does Petrado Indiano Hobbinso sound to you?!’

Mr Hobbins also said he was fed up with reading about ‘Africa’ on the CVs of would-be candidates.

A Tory spokesman said: ‘Councillor Hobbins has been immediately suspended from the Conservative Party and from the Conservative Group on Bromley council and he will play no part in the selection of the Parliamentary candidate. There is no room for racism in the Conservative Party.’

Source

Welfare without the state: "Although the rise of government welfare has had a similar impact on US private welfare as in the UK, the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) has survived the onslaught and is insightful in considering how private welfare can function outside of the state. Members of the church fund the program; on the first Sunday of every month everyone skips two meals and donates the saving from those meals. If a member loses income, becomes unemployed, etc. they meet with their local leader and together they determine the needs of that individual or family, and assistance is given accordingly.”

UK: Common sense isn’t common anymore: "The more a government legislates on our day to day activities, the less we take ownership of those activities ourselves. We begin to lose the ability of self-determination in our responsibilities, and as a consequence we have nothing else to fall back on apart from the rigid framework of state diktat. The disempowerment suffered by individuals under the thumb of the state leads to a stupefaction of social intercourse, and a learned helplessness that infects an ever increasing number of our daily interactions. These observations do not lead me to a negative conclusion in regards to the human condition and our potential for creating autonomous order in a stateless society. Far from it, the same human characteristics that lead to seemingly defeatist and subservient social patterns, are the very characteristics that will enable our liberation from this malaise.”





21 November, 2009

Obscene British "justice" again

Judge orders mother to hand over son to father he despises -- despite the best interests of the child being supposedly paramount

A judge ordered a mother to hand over her distraught young son to her ex-husband despite admitting it would be 'almost cataclysmic' for the child. The boy is happy living with his mother, is doing well at school and fiercely resists the move, a court heard. The 11-year-old child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, warned that his father had 'ruined my life' and said he would 'punch and kick' rather than leave his mother's home.

But Lord Justice Wall, a leading family judge, gave the woman less than a week to kiss her son goodbye before he is uprooted. She now faces being without her only child at Christmas. Last night a family friend said: 'It is horrific. He has good friends, he is bright and he loves his school, and now he is going to be taken to live two hours away.' Another friend said: 'I don't know how his mother is coping. 'How can it be right to take a boy away from the mother he loves to live with a father who he doesn't even know?' It is understood that the child does not yet know what lies ahead for him.

The child is expected to be taken to his father early next week and it is unclear when his mother will next see him. Last night the boy's father, who lives in an £800,000 detached stone cottage on the edge of a West Country village, declined to comment. A family member on the father's side said: 'The mother just wouldn't let go of her son and wouldn't let him let go. 'It's a very sad situation. You could say she was possessive. They broke up soon after he was born and there had been problems for a long time. She yes'd and no'd an awful lot and sadly broke promises.

'It's been an extremely distressing time for everyone. 'The father is an excellent man who cares deeply for his son so it has been especially hard for him. 'But in a horrible situation like this we recognise that it is also very difficult for the mother so it has been no good for anyone really.' Under the 1989 Children Act, courts must consider the child's interests above all else.

The mother's barrister told the Court of Appeal in London this week that the boy is adamant he wants nothing more to do with his father - with whom he only lived for a few months after his birth before his parents separated. Jane Hoyal told Lord Justice Wall: 'A move from the happy, settled and stable home he has with his mother would be momentous for this young man. 'There is no dispute that he will be very upset, angry and defiant when this hugely disruptive move is implemented.'

But a child psychiatrist and the boy's own court-appointed guardian were unanimous that he is 'suffering emotional harm' due to his alienation from his father, who lives a two-hour drive away. The boy's move to live with his father, who has remarried, was originally ordered by Judge Bond at Bournemouth Family Court earlier this month. That ruling was 'stayed' pending the mother's bid to overturn the decision at the Appeal Court.

But Lord Justice Wall refused permission to appeal. He said the higher court could only intervene if Judge Bond's decision was 'plainly wrong'. Despite the mother's 'ostensible willingness' for the father to have contact with the son, the boy's 'long-term psychological welfare' demanded he live with his father, he added. The father, said Lord Justice Wall, claimed he had found it impossible to build any sort of relationship with his son while he lived with his mother.

Miss Hoyal said the mother had co-operated with all contact arrangements - and gave her 'unconditional support' to her son having a relationship with his father. She told the court the couple had been engaged in 'almost continuous litigation' throughout the boy's life. She said the importance of the boy's relationship with his father had been elevated above all other factors, including the child's own wishes. She said the boy's father and stepmother would often be away working, leaving the boy to be cared for by a nanny.

But Lord Justice Wall said Judge Bond had made a ' sensible, careful, well thought-out and balanced judgment'. He added: 'I appreciate this will be hard for the mother and will be very hard for the boy.'

SOURCE



Tragedy of girl, five, struck by swine flu: Three NHS GPs and a hospital doctor thought she had tonsillitis

Diagnostic tests? Never heard of them!

A five-year-old girl suffering from swine flu died after doctors took two weeks to diagnose her illness, it was claimed last night. Nida Qureshi was seen by three GPs and a hospital doctor who told her parents she may have tonsillitis. By the time doctors discovered that she had the H1N1 virus, the youngster was on a life support machine, her family said. She died eight days later.

Last night relatives said Nida's parents - Zubair, 28, and Raheela, 30, who is pregnant with their second child - believe that their daughter may have survived if swine flu had been detected earlier. Nida's uncle, Jawaid Qureshi, said: 'Her mum, herself a child carer, and dad are very angry that doctors and GPs failed to diagnose it earlier. It's devastating. She may have lived if it had been diagnosed earlier.'

Mr Qureshi said Nida - a 'bright' girl without any underlying health problems - fell ill with a temperature and vomiting on October 19. The family phoned a GP, who advised paracetamol. The next day she went to her doctor and was prescribed antibiotics. Five days later, the family took her back but were told to carry on giving the antibiotics. On November 1, after her condition worsened, the family took her to A&E at their local hospital, Wexham Park, in Slough.

Mr Qureshi said: 'When she was breathing she was in agony. She was coughing a lot as well. The doctor at hospital said it might be tonsillitis but they did not take any blood or urine samples. They prescribed her with more medicine and said: "Go back to the GP if she continues not to feel well". It was a very bad decision to allow her to go home.'

Two days later she had a seizure and never regained consciousness. She was put on a life support machine and finally diagnosed with the H1N1 virus. Nida was transferred to St Mary's Hospital in London.

A spokesman for NHS Berkshire East said: 'We can confirm that a young girl from east Berkshire died at St Mary's Hospital, London, on November 11. She had tested positive for H1N1 swine flu.'

Professor John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary School of Medicine, said her death could have been caused when the swine flu virus moved into her central nervous system. Normally, the virus attacks the lungs. But in extremely rare cases, often affecting children, it can attack the nerve tissue and cause a seizure. He added: 'Diagnosing flu in a five-year-old is extremely difficult. It is also impossible to say if Tamiflu would have made any difference in this case.'

SOURCE



Warmist secrecy cracked by hacker

Hadley CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released. The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that Hadley Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown. I’m currently traveling and writing this from an aiprort, but here is what I know so far:

An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertsied an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents"

The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files. It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people. I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur - it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.

More HERE



Revealed: The design flaw in energy saving lightbulbs means they become dimmer over time

Energy-saving lightbulbs being used in millions of homes could lose up to 40 per cent of their brightness over the next few years, engineers warned yesterday. A design flaw in compact florescent bulbs mean they become dimmer as they age, a report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology said. Millions could need replacing long before their advertised lifespan of five or six years is reached.

The Government is phasing out traditional bulbs in order to meet Europe's climate change targets. Although other types of low energy bulb are available - including halogen and LED lights - most households are being encouraged to use compact fluorescent lamps. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says CFLs use a fifth of the energy of traditional bulbs, saving a typical home at least £37 a year and cutting the UK's carbon dioxide emissions by five million tons.

However, independent retailers and critics say many of the low-energy alternatives are ugly, expensive and produce poor quality light. Doctors have warned that CFLs may cause rashes in light-sensitive patients.

A report in Engineering and Technology Magazine now warns that CFLs lose 'a significant amount of brightness' over time. Even a good quality bulb could lose 20 per cent of its light over its 8,000-hour lifespan - while cheaper bulbs could dim even more. The problem is made worse because some manufacturers exaggerate how much light comes from CLFs in the first place, the report says. 'Consumers could end up with a CFL nearing the end of its life that emits just 60 per cent as much light as a supposedly equivalent incandescent bulb,' the report says. That means a CFL that begins life as bright as a traditional 100watt bulb, could become as dim as a 60watt bulbs.

CFLs give off light when a current passes through a gas-filled tube. The gas glows with ultraviolet radiation which lights up a coating of white phosphor on the inside of the tube. Over time, this coating loses some of its ability to light up.

Other low-energy bulbs don't have the same problem. A halogen light - which uses 70 per cent of the energy of a conventional bulb - remains bright throughout its life. LED bulbs - which are beginning to appear in conventional bulb shapes and brightness - are also more reliable.

Editor in chief of Engineering and Technology Dickon Ross said most people were unaware that CFLs eventually lost their brightness. 'Our article goes someway to explaining consumers' dissatisfaction with CFLs and it's interesting that the major manufacturers have switched their focus to the development of LED lighting,' he said.

The Energy Saving Trust, which is funded by the Government, confirmed CFLs did lose brightness but claimed most people would not notice the difference. Trust-approved bulbs should never fall below 76 per cent of their initial brightness, it added.

SOURCE



A climate scare in Trafalgar Square

Ghost Forest, a new art installation, wants to frighten us into changing our greedy, planet-wrecking ways

A twenty-first century tribute to the Royal Family? A satirical swipe at the Labour government? A mistaken delivery address? At first, it’s difficult to know what to make of the large hunks of dead wood currently cutting a dash in London’s Trafalgar Square.

That is, until you read the info-boards positioned around the installation or encounter the press-released promotional material. At which point Ghost Forest’s meaning, or better still, its message, will become all too clear: all this modern stuff, this industrial development, has come at an environmental cost we’ve been able to ignore for too long. Why? Because it’s always been over there, in Africa, in South America. But not any more. In the form of huge tree stumps it’s been brought close, dumped in our figurative backyard. To quote its creator, the journalist-cum-artist Angela Palmer, it is an awareness-raising, visual expression of the ‘connection between deforestation and climate change’.

Featuring nine huge tree trunks (plus one injured one) which have been dragged across, and then ferried over from the Suhuma forest reserve in western Ghana, Ghost Forest is perhaps not the most appropriate name. With each trunk assigned its own slab on which to lie, a more accurate one would’ve been ‘The Tree Mortuary’. Which is certainly how it feels to walk around it. The trunks are arrayed like a body parts, their angry tangle of roots straining out like the veins and capillaries of gigantic limbs at one end, while at the other end there is just a clean, surgical, lumberjack’s cut. It’s as if you’re being encouraged to look at the results of planetary surgery, to survey the casualities of man’s open-heart conquest of nature. Palmer is clearly not insensible to the effect, judging by her anthropomorphic language. The roots are like ‘nerve-endings’, she says, the rainforests themselves, ‘the world’s “lungs”’.

This isn’t to say unsuspecting visitors were entirely clear as to what the stumps mean. Speaking on Monday, Palmer seemed unconcerned: ‘Many observers will see the stumps as beautiful sculptural objects; others will perhaps see the installation as a scene of devastation, others may see the tree stumps posited in the no-man’s land between the past and the future. For others the installation may represent an overt piece of political activism – a call to arms. I am equally comfortable with all responses.’ Beautiful sculptural objects? A no-man’s land between the past and the future? The most common response, from what I could see, was to stand next to the planet’s ripped-out lungs, and grin for the camera. After all, it’s not everyday some kindly artist leaves nine three-metre wide trunks around central London.

This surely missed Palmer’s point. Because whatever Palmer says, there was a point, a big, blunt change-your-ways point to Ghost Forest. Little wonder those reporting its opening on Monday were in no doubt as to what Ghost Forest was saying. In the words of Art Daily, ‘Ghost Forest’ is ‘a powerful visual statement about climate change’. ‘[A]s a microcosm of planetary overconsumption of expendable resources’, concluded the Londonist, ‘it’s a powerful statement’. Hence this Sunday it will leave London and head to Thorvaldsens Plads in Copenhagen to ‘raise awareness’ before the start of the UN climate change summit in December.

The reviewers had clearly read the promotional material. And this was the problem with Ghost Forest as art. In clued-up reports, in interviews on the Ghost Forest website, and on the 300-word-long, on-site info boards, the meaning of Ghost Forest was all too articulated. If the installation itself was ambiguous, a selection of barely worked-up Ghanaian tree stumps, its message was clear and overwrought. In fact the message could have done without its truncated embodiment in the wooden sculptures – the content here had no need of its form.

Overtly didactic art is nothing new, but what marks a project like the Ghost Forest out is the extent to which the hectoring content is liberated from the material in which it was to be represented. Little wonder that the UK foreign secretary’s special representative for climate change, John Ashworth, was able to praise it before it actually existed as an installation – after all it was the message, not its formal realisation, that was valuable. ‘We need to reach people in other ways as well’, he told Palmer. ‘Since the crisis we face is about who we are before it is about what we should do, the role of art will be critical. So I applaud what you are doing, and wish it success. You will in effect be confronting some of those who pass through Trafalgar Square with the consequence of their choices.’

Confront people with the consequence of their choices? This is art as behaviour-changing device. As Palmer explains on her website: ‘Its location in Trafalgar Square is key: it is one of the world’s most visited tourist sites and the epicentre of Western industrialisation over the past 200 years.’ In other words, for didactic purposes, plonking it in the centre of London allows it to tell as many people off as possible, from tourists to Christmas shoppers. It’s tricky to avoid The Message if you have to walk the long way round it.

Then there’s the element of juxtaposition, of bringing the distant near, of shoving the natural in the face of the social. In the midst of a developed society, ‘an epicentre of industrialisation’, the mortified tree stumps, symbols of the underside of industrial progress, exist to discomfit, to unsettle. They are signs that something is wrong. This is a gesture premised on the perceived complacency of the public, their selfish behaviour. And as if the distaste for the lives of modern citizens wasn’t writ large enough, Palmer is prepared to take her fetish for the primitive and animistic one step further: tomorrow, an Amazonian chief is going to bless the trees in a special ceremony.

Which does make you wonder. Perhaps Palmer is actually being subversive. After all, like Mark McGowan’s attempt to ‘raise awareness’ about water wastage by leaving the tap running in his London gallery, it took Palmer a large ship, and several tonnes of heavy haulage, to drag a symbol of excessive energy consumption to its current resting place. Add to that the power expended by the electricity generators to keep the lights blazing through the night, and Palmer’s carbon footprint must be at least the size of ten large Ghanaian trees. This must surely be one giant environmentalist wheeze, a satire of sanctimony, right?

Perhaps not: ‘The artist considered carefully the carbon footprint which would be incurred in the project’, the info-board tells us, ‘but felt its potential message to millions of people on the impacts of deforestation would outweigh the carbon “spend”. The carbon cost of “Ghost Forest” will be calculated and offset on a ClimateCare project which has introduced more energy efficient cooking stoves to Ghana, meaning fewer trees are needed to provide cooking fuel.’

This is straight-faced contemporary art all right. It is art for those who know the carbon price of everything and the value of nothing. And art without value is not really art at all.

SOURCE



British schools “ignoring needs of brightest pupils”

Too many heads are ignoring the needs of their brightest pupils, one of the country’s leading state school heads said today. Liz Allen, headmistress of Newstead Wood Girls’ School in Bromley, one of the top performing grammar schools in England, told a conference: “I find there is a huge reluctance amongst my secondary head colleagues to focus any kind of real attention, activity or resources on the most able pupils.” She criticised heads for spending too much time trying to convert D grades into C grades at GCSE, rather than helping the brightest pupils “walk on water” and get A* grades.

Mrs Allen, a former president of the Association of Maintained Girls’ Schools, which represents the majority of state girls’ schools, also attacked the Government’s focus on guaranteeing one-to-one coaching for all pupils struggling to keep up in class. “I’m concerned about that – I’m very concerned about it,” she told the Girls’ School Association conference in Harrogate yesterday. “Let’s say I’m not very good at running the 100 metres. If the Government was to pay for me to have a personal tutor to run the 100 metres, would I clip much off my time? Would it be a wise investment? I think not. “I can see huge value in investing one to one time in our independent and successful young learners, though.”

Mrs Allen added that there was far too much focus “on the rather crude stuff of league tables and the D/C grade borderline pupils, rather than on the bright child”. She cited a government-funded research study which showed that, as a result of neglect, bright pupils were often “easily bored, window-gazers, subservient, sometimes reluctant to commit pen to paper”.

She said her school, which was selective, did not receive any money from the Government’s standards fund to provide one-to-one tuition for her pupils. However, despite the lack of money she set aside time for all her pupils to receive individual coaching from the start of their secondary school career. They received the equivalent half a day a week, inserted into six weeks in the middle of each term, when they were given the whole of Thursdays to work with an individual teacher.

She added that girls’ ambitions to succeed could be “crushed” in mixed schools. “In a single sex environment, they’re very concerned about their competitiveness – but they compete to do well rather than compete against each other,” she said. “In a mixed environment, they cease to be competitive. They realise everybody else feels the same. Boys are going to be more dominant.”

SOURCE





20 November, 2009

Condemned to an early death: British rationing body tells liver cancer victims that life-prolonging drug is 'too costly'

Liver cancer sufferers are being condemned to an early death by being denied a new drug on the Health Service, campaigners warn. They criticised draft guidance that will effectively ban the drug sorafenib - which is routinely used in every other country where it is licensed. Trials show the drug, which costs £36,000 a year, can increase survival by around six months for patients who have run out of options.

The Government's rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) said the overall cost was 'simply too high' to justify the 'benefit to patients'. However, relatively few would be eligible for the treatment - around 700, or one in four of those diagnosed each year with primary liver cancer.

Nice had claimed it was approving more drugs under End of Life policies introduced in January meant to benefit small numbers of terminally ill people. So far two drugs have been approved for three cancers. But two drugs have been banned under the rules, with a ban pending on three further drugs including sorafenib.

Its treatment of sorafenib contrasts sharply with that of breast cancer drug herceptin, which has received far more funding and attention after successful campaigns. Herceptin, under separate Nice criteria, has been judged to be cost effective. It currently costs £22,000 to administer an annual course of the drug to around 7,000 women - around £154million.

In contrast, the treatment for sorafenib would potentially cost £25million a year. Sorafenib, also called Nexavar, was assessed on different rules but still failed to meet the Nice threshold.

Kate Spall, founder of the Pamela Northcott Fund, which assists cancer patients denied new therapies, last night said cancer sufferers had been sold down the river. She said: 'These policies were specifically designed to help patients with rarer cancer such as liver to access new treatments for a previously untreatable disease. 'This decision will condemn patients to an earlier death than was necessary.' Only 20 per cent of patients with primary liver cancer - where the tumour originates in the liver - are alive one year after diagnosis.

Bayer, which makes the drug and plans to appeal the decision, had offered a scheme where it would provide every fourth packet for free. Dr Harpreet Wasan, a cancer consultant at London's Hammersmith Hospital, said: 'This cancer is not like any other cancer. There is no alternative treatment. Every other drug that has been tried fails to work. 'British doctors were heavily involved in the trials of this drug yet NICE will say we can't prescribe it.'

Nice rates the cost-effectiveness of a drug using a complicated measurement called a 'quality adjusted life year' or QALY. This determines the cost of new treatment by working out how much it improves and extends a life compared with existing treatments. Andrew Dillon, chief executive of Nice, said: 'We have recently changed our approach to appraising high cost treatments which can extend life for terminally ill patients. 'This has meant that more of them are now recommended.'

Professor Jonathan Waxman, a cancer specialist at Imperial College, London, said: 'The only reason Nice has approved any drugs under End of Life rules is because of a High Court ruling and doctors' protests. 'We must have a public debate about how it treats cancer patients.'

The Nice guidance applies to England and Wales. Scotland's equivalent body is yet to make a decision on sorafenib but tends to follow Nice.

Tony Almond, 46, went to the doctor complaining of indigestion in September. Three days later he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and told he had a month to live. Mr Almond, a truck driver living in Brackley, near Northampton, and his long-term partner Sharon immediately got married by special licence on October 16. He said: 'We'd been talking about getting married at Christmas but now I was told I had two to four weeks to live. 'It was pretty horrendous, especially when I found I couldn't have the only drug that would help because it was too expensive.'

Cancer specialists applied to Northamptonshire Primary Care Trust for funding, which is a necessary procedure for such drugs prior to approval by Nice, the drugs rationing body. But the request was rejected. With the backing of an NHS consultant in Birmingham, however, he appealed the decision and won. Mr Almond has been taking the drug for two weeks. He said: 'I can honestly say I no longer feel ill. It's a wonder drug and I feel angry that others may be denied the chance we had to fight so hard for.'

Could the Herceptin victory offer hope? It is three years since Ann Marie Rogers won her famous court victory which forced the Health Service to give her - and other breast cancer victims - access to the wonder drug Herceptin. The drug had been turned down by rationing watchdog Nice but Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt told trusts that they could not deny the drug on grounds of costs.

Now another group of cancer sufferers are facing a similar battle but it is unlikely that we will see Andy Burnham, the current Health Secretary, taking a similar stance --because this time the drug that has been turned down, Nexavar, is one that helps against liver cancer. The problem for campaigners is that liver cancer is not as high profile as breast cancer. This is partly down to the fact that fewer people get cancer of the liver than are diagnosed with breast cancer - around 3,000 a year compared with 45,000.

But that is not the whole story. Breast cancer has two charities fighting its corner - Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Care - both of which attract millions of pounds in donations, and help boost the profile. Other cancers tend to fade into the background. There is, for example, still no prostate cancer screening programme that compares to the major screening programme for breast cancer. Yet around 10,000 of the 35,000 men in the UK diagnosed with prostate cancer each year die from their disease - a similar number to the 11,900 breast cancer victims.

SOURCE



Yes, some jokes can be offensive ... but is Britain losing its sense of humour?

A blonde asks for help with a jigsaw puzzle after struggling for hours to make the pieces fit into the shape of the farmyard rooster pictured on the front of the box. Eventually, her boyfriend says: 'Let's just put all the Cornflakes back in the box.' This is an example of the wit and wisdom of multi-millionaire financier Mark Lowe, who is being sued for sexual discrimination and unfair constructive dismissal by Jordan Wimmer, a 29-year- old Canadian former employee, who happens to be blonde.

Wimmer claims she was the target of Lowe's 'dumb blonde' jokes. She says that even after she was treated in a clinic for severe depression, Lowe continued to bombard her with inappropriate jokes. For his part, he claims he was only having a bit of a laugh, and it never occurred to him that she would take offence.

Clearly, Mark Lowe is not a man with whom many of us would choose to get stuck in a lift. Having a holiday with him would surely be a nightmare. Miss Wimmer says he took prostitutes and escorts to business meetings - charges he hotly denies. The fact that some of us might not enjoy Mark Lowe's company very much, or find his jokes very funny, is only part of the story. The case serves as a good illustration of how dangerous it can be these days to make jokes.

The late Bernard Manning used to have a joke - 'I once got the sack for laughing.' Then after a silence he admitted: 'I was driving a hearse.' It was a sad joke really, for in the end Manning really did get the sack for laughing. His brand of humour was considered too sexist, too racist, too just-about-everything-ist for today's po-faced Britain.

It was only recently, in the wake of the events of September 11 and concerns about Muslim persecution, that the then Home Secretary David Blunkett introduced his Religious Hatred Bill, intending to make it a criminal offence to poke fun at religion - even though this has been the stuff of comedy in all free countries for centuries.

Monty Python's film Life Of Brian has jokes about the Crucifixion. And one of the funniest of Peter Cook's dialogues had him, as a shepherd abiding in the fields, describing the Nativity to Dudley Moore from the Nazareth Gazette. 'Was the Holy Ghost present?' Dudley asked, to which Cook replied: 'Hard to tell.' When asked how Joseph looked in the stable, Cook, the shepherd, replied: 'Quite frankly, gobsmacked.'

Rowan Atkinson once described a scene in Not The Nine O'Clock News where a shot of worshippers bowing to the ground in a mosque was coupled with the voiceover: 'And the search for the Ayatollah's contact lens continues.'

Until Blunkett's Bill was watered down in the House of Lords, we really were about to enter a world in which such jokes might have put their perpetrators in prison.

Context is, of course, everything where humour is concerned. When in Year Six at her primary school, aged ten, my daughter and her friends all loved repeating 'blonde' jokes. No doubt they would have liked the one about the jigsaw and the cornflake-packet mix-up. I asked one of the girls who liked these jokes whether she did not think them offensive. This particular girl was, after all, a natural blonde. She just giggled. The girls were not bullying the blondes. They were enjoying the jokes. Eventually they grew out of them, and went on to some other excruciating collection of jokes.

I can imagine situations, of course, in which the blonde joke is very unfunny - especially if, beneath the veneer of humour there was bullying or cruelty. It is so easy to make remarks which are blatant racialism, for example, and then, when offence is taken, retreat behind the facade of: 'Can't you take a joke?' Making remarks or jokes which you know will be upsetting to another person in your hearing is obviously the mark of a bully and it cannot be defended. But we have gone far too far in the opposite direction. We have become a society which positively encourages people to take offence.

Some of Bernard Manning's jokes were offensive. But some were really quite good jokes: 'If you dial 999 in Bradford, you don't get the police coming round - you get the Bengal Lancers.' I think you would need to be an incredibly humourless Bangladeshi not to see that this reference to a regiment from the high days of the British Raj was quite a funny joke about immigrants. Manning was not making a mockery of people from Bengal because they were from Bengal. He was making a joke about the fact that Bradford is very full of Asians. And in so far as jokes depend upon an element of surprise, there is something picturesque about expecting the arrival of Z-cars and getting instead the Bengal Lancers on their horses, dressed in topis and turbans.

It is possible to be too sensitive, and to encourage others to be needlessly touchy. We now live in a Britain where it is expected that other people will take offence if we so much as notice differences. The 'blonde' joke is simply a variation on the classic joke about some group or category deemed to be stupid. In some contexts, these jokes are made about Irish people. In Ireland, the jokes are made about Kerry men. In other parts of Europe the same jokes are made about Poles. It would be a mad world if we really thought that Irish people or Poles were stupider than the rest of us.

The jokes would be wearisome if they were made too often. But never to make such jokes is actually very patronising to whichever group you are allegedly trying to protect. It implies that all blondes - or all Irish people, or all Kerry men - are such wimps, and so in need of protection, that you must never, in any circumstances, make jokes about them.

Life is often dull, and quite often it is painful. Jokes and laughter spring out of this fact. In places where men and women are facing harsh realities - in the Armed Forces, for example, or in hospital - jokes are the staple of conversation. "It's being so cheerful as keeps me going", as the woman used to say on the It's That Man Again comedy show on radio during World War II.

Jokes today are lavatorial, crude and vulgar while at the same time being somehow shamelessly politically correct. Many alternative comedians, and would-be funny men and women employed by the BBC, think it is perfectly OK to make jokes on prime-time TV about intimate parts of the Queen's anatomy, but they would have an attack of the vapours if you repeated on air the sort of unfunny jokes we all used to tell as children about 'An Englishman an Irishman and a Scotsman'. Only last month, BBC executives suffered a meltdown when Andrew Neil, in his late-night political show, light-heartededly compared the black Labour MP Diane Abbott to a chocolate HobNob.

I would much rather live in a world where comedians sometimes 'go too far', than in a tight-lipped dictatorship where you do not dare to make a joke because someone else will think it 'totally unacceptable' - to use that pompous phrase which is trotted out all too often nowadays by the thought police. Acceptable to whom? Laughter really is the best medicine, as they used to say in the dear old Reader's Digest. Humour should not need censorship. Jokes sometimes are cruel.

It is patronising to women, Jews, black people, Irish people, or indeed to anyone, to suggest they are too thin-skinned ever to hear a joke in which some stereotypical attitude is betrayed.

If the aim of the joke is to bully, to harass, or to enforce ugly prejudice, it is not very likely to be funny. But if the aim is to be funny - and if it succeeds in being funny (at least in some contexts) then surely we should welcome anything which brings a smile to our lives.

SOURCE



Britain lurches towards 'secret' justice as judge rules security services can give evidence in closed courts

Britain took another lurch towards 'secret' justice yesterday when a judge ruled that the state can for the first time withhold evidence from people involved in civil cases. The decision means claimants will be left unaware of the evidence the police, Government or security services are using to blacken their name as they contest a case for damages.

Lawyers described Mr Justice Silber's ruling as a 'constitutional outrage' that overturns 'the whole history of the fundamental principle that both sides must be on an equal footing'.

Justice Sibler's ruling will affect the case of Binyam Mohamed and six other British residents, who all allege the UK was complicit in his torture by overseas agents during their time at Guantanamo Bay. His finding concerns claims lodged by Binyam Mohamed and six others UK residents previously detained at the U.S. camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, who allege Britain was complicit in their torture by overseas agents.

The intelligence services want their evidence disputing the claims to be available only in secret hearings, using a 'special advocate' system, which has so far been restricted to immigration and terrorist control order cases. It means the information is kept hidden from the individuals involved on the grounds of 'national security'. Only a lawyer appointed on their behalf sees the intelligence, and he is not able discuss it with the accused.

But despite these 'Kafkaesque restrictions never being permitted in a civil court before, Mr Justice Silber ruled in the High Court yesterday that there there was no reason in law why a 'closed' court procedure should not be employed in a civil damages case.

The seven - Mohamed, Bisher Al Rawi, Jamil El Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga - had all wanted their case to be heard under the 'public interest immunity' procedure. This prevents evidence and allegations being used as evidence by either side if the disclosure could reveal sensitive sources or pose a threat to national security.

The seven are suing the Government for unlawful acts and conspiracy. They deny any involvement in terrorism and allege that MI5 and MI6 aided and abetted their unlawful imprisonment and 'extraordinary rendition' to various places, including Guantanamo Bay, where they were subjected to inhuman treatment and to torture. The Government and security services have denied the claims. The case will now go to the appeal courts.

In addition to cases at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and control order hearings, the Government recently passed a law to allow inquests to be replaced with secret investigations. The family courts also remain shrouded in secrecy.

Former shadow home secretary David Davis said yesterday's ruling was part of a 'very, very worrying slippery slope' towards secret hearings. He added: 'It may be victory for the intelligence services, but it is an affront to open justice'.

Louise Christian, a lawyer for some of the claimants, said the ruling overturned 'the whole history of the common law and the fundamental principle that both sides must be on an equal footing'. She added: 'The judge has sanctioned what would be a constitutional outrage.'

Tim Hancock, of Amnesty International, said: 'This ruling means alleged complicity by the UK authorities is likely to remain hidden.'

A Home Office spokesman welcomed the court's decision, saying that in closed proceedings special advocates representing the claimants would have access to the sensitive material. 'We believe this strikes the right balance - protecting the wider public interest and ensuring national security is not harmed whilst allowing cases to be tried fairly,' he added.

SOURCE



Nigerian man married his OWN daughter so she would be allowed to stay in Britain - and the British government knew about it

A Nigerian Home Office worker 'married' his own daughter to get her a British visa, the Daily Mail can reveal. The extraordinary scam was apparently executed by Jelili Adesanya while ministers turned a blind eye. Mr Adesanya, 54, has lived here for more than 30 years and holds a British passport, but wanted his daughter, her husband and their four sons to join him from Nigeria.

He faked a wedding ceremony complete with a photograph of the happy 'couple' which helped fool immigration officials that his daughter, Karimotu Adenike, was really his wife. Miss Adenike, who is in her mid-30s, was duly granted permission to live in the UK. The pair are waiting for her to be granted a permanent right to remain before they undergo a quiet divorce and attempt to bring the rest of her family here. It is expected she would try to remarry her real husband to get them all visas.

But despite being tipped off two years ago, the Home Office seems to have done nothing to stop the scam by one of their own workers. Until recently, Mr Adesanya was employed as an occupational health nurse for the Home Office, working with immigration officials at Gatwick airport.

A whistleblower sent letters to the High Commission in Lagos and the UK Border Agency including specific details such as names, addresses, passport numbers and even a copy of the wedding photograph. When there was no response, he sent emails to then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and ministers Vernon Coaker and Phil Woolas on February 1 this year. He heard nothing.

Mr Adesanya, who came to Britain in 1976, flew back to Nigeria on May 29, 2007, and held the bogus wedding ceremony a few days later at a register office in Ikorodu, Lagos. A source said: 'They paid people to attend the wedding so that the British High Commission in Lagos would believe it was genuine. The commission then gave Karimotu Adenike a two-year settlement visa in October 2007. 'On her settlement visa application form, of course, she did not mention that she already had a husband and four children. 'The date of birth on her Nigerian passport is not her real date of birth.' Miss Adenike is believed to have aged herself by ten years on her wedding certificate to disguise the age gap with her father.

Although her settlement visa expired last month, she is hoping to be given the right to remain.

David Burrowes, the Conservative MP for Enfield Southgate and Shadow Justice Minister, was also tipped off by the whistleblower and wrote to the Home Office. This time there was a reply, but it said that although the matter was 'under investigation', no further information would be provided because it could 'breach of our obligations under the Data Protection Act'. Mr Burrowes told the Mail: 'I am very surprised and concerned that no action appears to have been taken, because the allegations are extremely serious.'

Mr Adesanya, who lives with his daughter in Dagenham, Essex, vehemently denied the plot and said he had never been questioned about the allegations. He said: 'Married my own daughter? I have never heard anything like this in my life. I deny it. She is my wife, not my daughter.' However, asked to confirm his 'wife's' date of birth, he said he did not know without checking her passport, and refused to allow her to speak for herself.

Unbeknown to him, his daughter had confirmed the arrangement when she told a friend she would shortly apply for her own British passport and 'divorce daddy'.

Last night Jonathan Sedgwick, from the UK Border Agency, said: 'These individuals are already under investigation, and I want to make it clear that abuse of our immigration laws will not be tolerated. 'If we identify marriages which we believe are not genuine, we will challenge them and prosecute where appropriate. 'We are determined to send home any foreign nationals convicted of these types of crimes once they have served their sentences.' [But only if a newspaper draws attention to it]

SOURCE



British regulator's pupil safety rules are impossible, say head teachers

Highly performing schools are being penalised by Ofsted for a lack of security gates, high fences and entry codes to keep out intruders. Under a new inspection regime introduced this term, schools that do not make pupils “feel safe” are judged to be failing.

Head teachers claimed yesterday that inspectors were trying to catch schools out as they scrambled to update child protection policies. They called for Ofsted to reverse the rule after one of the most improved schools in England was told that its security was inadequate. A parental survey, part of the inspection process, at Lawnswood School in Leeds indicated that 1.3 per cent of parents thought that it did not keep children safe and inspectors marked it down despite record results last year.

Another school was judged to be inadequate because inspectors deemed the fence around the playground low enough for child snatchers to reach in and grab pupils. A third failed because inspectors were offered coffee before they were asked for identification.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that it was important that schools were safe places but warned that they were being asked to implement unworkable safety arrangements. “We are concerned that very good schools will fail inspections because of unreasonable requirements,” she said.

Milan Davidovic, the headmaster of Lawnswood School, wrote to Ofsted complaining about its verdict. “There was a definite feeling that the inspectors were coming to grips with the framework themselves, a feeling that it wasn’t clearly understood,” he said.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that one inspector found his way into a school through a back entrance and began talking to pupils. The school failed because he was able to gain access without being asked for identification. A single glitch in safeguarding documentation or practice was enough to put schools into an “at risk” category, he added, and he called for Ofsted to separate judgments on academic achievement from child protection.

Ofsted’s new inspection framework stipulates that “where a school is judged to be inadequate in relation to the quality of the school’s procedures for safeguarding . . . the school’s overall effectiveness is also likely to be judged inadequate”. Details of the rules were published in July, giving schools little time to make changes. Since the new framework came into place one in five schools has moved down the ranking after inspection.

A spokesman for Ofsted said: “The protection of children is of the highest priority for Ofsted across all its inspection remits and we have revised our safeguarding guidance for school inspections from September to ensure an appropriate focus on this vital area. “However, schools are not judged to be inadequate as a result of minor administrative errors or issues that are not serious. Very few schools have been judged to be inadequate for their safeguarding arrangements only since the beginning of September.”

Case Study: "We're Judged on a feeling"

Lawnswood School in Leeds holds several education awards and was one of the Top Ten most improved schools in England last year (Joanna Sugden writes). But it has just been placed in special measures by Ofsted. A survey of parents at the school, which has 1,500 pupils, yielded only 123 replies and found that 20 parents felt their children did not feel safe at the school. It has just been given notice to improve under new rules that write schools off if they fail safeguarding measures.

“We are being judged on a feeling,” said Milan Davidovic, the headmaster. “If a few parents raise that as an issue then Ofsted has to take it into account.”

Lawnswood was given the healthy schools award, which recognises that pupils are feeling safe and happy. But, Mr Davidovic said that Ofsted did not take this into account. “The framework can act like a pack of cards, one judgment can make another judgment fail. We believe it is unfair,” he said. “It’s not to do with Criminal Records Bureau checks; it’s to do with a reported feeling that we are being judged on. “The students are disappointed that Ofsted have this view. But our spirits aren’t as low as they would be if the outcome [of the inspection] did reflect the true situation.”

The headmaster has written Ofsted a letter of complaint containing 23 points of disagreement.

SOURCE



Yuk! " Talk about Washington and London's special relationship. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has admitted she has a "crush" on Britain's youthful-looking, 44-year-old Foreign Minister David Miliband, according to an interview published in US Vogue magazine. "Oh my God!" she told a Vogue journalist in the December issue. "If you saw him it would be a big crush." Ms Clinton, who is married to former US president Bill Clinton, described Mr Miliband as "vibrant, vital, attractive, smart. He's a really good guy - and he is so young!" According to Britain's Sun daily, Mr Miliband reciprocated the gushing feelings, calling Ms Clinton, 62, "delightful" and a "tease".





19 November, 2009

Big Brother quiz for new school parents: British officials launch 83-point probe into families' lives

Parents of five-year-olds starting school have been sent an 83-point questionnaire that probes personal details of their lives. It asks whether their children tell lies or bully others, and if they steal at home or from shops. Parents are questioned over whether they have friends, if they can speak freely with others in their family and how well they did at school themselves. The form also delves into family routines, questioning whether they eat takeaways and if the children drink water with their meals.

Thousands of families in Lincolnshire were sent the forms as part of trials of a 'Healthy Child Programme' being developed in Whitehall. The Department of Health wants all families in England and Wales to fill in similar forms. The information will be held indefinitely on NHS databases for the use of health workers. Planners want new forms submitted each year to build up a detailed picture of the family and their children's development. Children themselves will fill in questionnaires when they become old enough.

The aim is to 'enhance children's life chances' but critics warned of unprecedented intrusion into family life and the growth of a major new state database. Parents have been told the information is 'confidential' but it will be available to health workers who will decide whether families should be approached by health visitors offering 'support'. [In Britain "support" often means taking your kids away] It will also be used to identify districts with widespread health and social problems so officials can plan and target health campaigns.

There is no legal compulsion to fill in the School Entry Wellbeing Review forms, but parents who do not are likely to be visited by community nurses charged with identifying vulnerable families. [i.e. your kids might be taken off you]

Dylan Sharpe of the Big Brother Watch pressure group said: 'This is incredibly intrusive and asks questions which, quite frankly, Lincolnshire Community Health Services do not need to know and have no right knowing. 'Even worse, the NHS Trust has failed to make it clear that this is a voluntary questionnaire. I would advise any parent receiving this to stick it straight in the bin.'

Jill Kirby of the centre-right think tank Centre for Policy Studies said: 'This is badly wrong for a number of reasons. 'Parents are not told how the information will be used, nor that they can refuse to give it and it will create worry and suspicion among many families. 'It risks labelling children and families as problem cases when the aim should be to help children escape from difficult backgrounds. It will make families wary and those most in need of help are likely to retreat from it.'

Joy Wood, clinical team leader at Lincolnshire Community Health Services, said shorter questionnaires had been sent in previous years. This year's trial was intended to help identify vulnerable children. She said: 'The intention is that the children that need our services will be supported [i.e. taken away]. We are not keeping this information to be divulged to third parties.'

After a complaint from a parent, letters are being sent out making it clear that filling in the form is voluntary. The Department of Health said last night: 'Many local areas currently administer a questionnaire to parents as the basis for a review at school entry. 'The Healthy Child Programme includes the commitment to build on good practice to make available a standardised, evaluated version. 'We will ensure this complies with legal requirements in relation to data handling and approaches to encourage take-up. 'This questionnaire will be an additional tool to safeguard and support all children's health and wellbeing.'

SOURCE



British Council forced to apologise for prosecuting parents of boy who suffered 'school phobia'

Education chiefs who prosecuted a teenager's parents for allowing him to play truant have been forced to apologise after the boy claimed he had 'school phobia'. The youngster missed months of lessons after becoming anxious about returning to his Suffolk secondary school following a viral illness. The boy said staff made sarcastic remarks when he tried to attend classes, with one saying 'on a chair' when he asked where he should sit.

The teenager's failure to regularly attend prompted his school in conjunction with Suffolk County Council to take his parents to court for condoning truancy. They could have been landed with a jail term or £2,500 fine. But magistrates dismissed the case and now a tribunal has ruled the council discriminated against the boy in launching the prosecution. They said education bosses failed to take proper account of the boy's mental health.

But the council today said it was 'disappointed' by the ruling and may appeal. It has been ordered to write to each of the parents and the boy apologising 'unreservedly' for its treatment of him.

Head teachers' leaders have previously warned that school phobia could be used as a 'classic excuse' for not attending lessons. 'You have to get to the root of the pupils' problem - it may be their relationship with teachers, bullying or just that they haven't settled in,' said David Hart, former general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. 'Transferring the child to another school could be the solution. But school phobia is just an excuse for failure to attend.'

But the boy's parents insisted the school and council failed to understand his mental health problems and failed to properly cater for his needs. His problems began when he developed chronic anxiety after taking time off due to a virus soon after joining the east Suffolk secondary school. The teenager was diagnosed by a clinical psychologist as suffering from school phobia, a condition described as an irrational fear of going to school. It is increasingly cited by psychologists and is said to affect one to two per cent of the school population.

The youngster, now 16, would often refuse to leave the house and suffer panic attacks which would result in him rocking backward and forward and clutching his knuckles. It also led to him distancing himself from friends and social situations. His GP had told magistrates: 'He found that attending school was highly anxiety-provoking and when he attempted to attend school he found he had great difficulty with that. 'I think attending school full-time certainly caused him significant psychological problems.'

At a one-day trial in June at South East Suffolk magistrates court, the council said the boy missed 59 per cent of registration sessions over a given time period. But the court cleared the parents of allowing their son to play truant.

At the same time, the parents took the council and school to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal for unlawfully discriminating against their son by failing to acknowledge his mental health problems. The tribunal found in their favour, prompting the boy's father to declare: 'We are very pleased with the outcome and very pleased that an external body has come to the same conclusion as we have all along. 'All the people that we have come across, whether that be barristers, solicitors or doctors, they all said the same thing, that this prosecution is wrong and should not be happening.

'The judge and her colleagues listened very carefully and came to the same conclusion that we thought they would, which was that the prosecution should not have happened and if people had been better informed and better trained to understand mental health they would not have kept pushing down the line that they did.' He added: 'The decision means it will benefit other children tremendously in the long run. 'My only want is that my son grows into the person that he would have been by now if it was not for the prosecution. The whole thing has held us all back.'

In addition to letters of apology, the council has been ordered to send key officials for training on the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The parents should invited to observe this training, the tribunal said.

Adrian Orr, a senior adviser at Suffolk's Children and Young People's Services, said: 'Both Suffolk County Council and the governing body of the school have now received the decision of the tribunal and are studying it carefully. 'We are disappointed by the decision and are currently taking legal advice on whether or not there are grounds for appeal.'

SOURCE



High dropout rates undermine stupid British plans for degree-only nursing

Plans to make nursing a degree-only profession could be thwarted by the high number of students who drop out before finishing training, the latest figures suggest. More than half of students on some nursing degree courses do not graduate because of pressures of time, money and the academic standards demanded. The figures, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, show wide variations in attrition rates among England’s 10 strategic health authorities.

At one university, in the North West, 51 per cent of students fail to complete its degree programme in adult nursing. The highest attrition rates in London, the South West, West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber show more than a third of students dropping out.

The Department of Health is so concerned about the problem that it ordered an annual report on dropout rates from university nursing courses, Nursing Attrition National Aggregate. However, it has not published the findings.

The figures, obtained by Nursing Standard magazine,dropouts are even more common. One university lost 78 per cent of students on a children’s nursing degree course, and more than 54 per cent of students on a mental health nursing course failed to graduate.

The findings come a week after The Times reported on government plans to require those wishing to become a nurse to have a degree. Supporters claim that the move, which will be enforced from 2013, will improve the quality of patient care and raise the status of nursing.

Critics suggest that the changes will create an elitist profession and scare off recruits with the prospect of a long and expensive period of study. There are also concerns that some nurses would be “too clever to care” and refuse to carry out duties such as washing and feeding patients and helping them to the lavatory.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said that the dropout rates cast degree-only plans into disarray. Concerns have also been raised about the millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, given in bursaries, wasted on courses that were not completed. “These figures appear to massively undermine the Government’s new plans for nurses,” he said. “Such high dropout rates suggest there is something seriously wrong. Ministers are burying their heads in the sand by refusing to publish their own report into quit rates.”

Nursing education specialists said that financial difficulties and the high number of mature students who juggled families with their studies were among the main reasons for dropping out.

Nurses, who make up the largest part of the NHS workforce, now require the minimum of a diploma — a nursing course lasting two or three years — for trainee nursing positions. Under the new rules, candidates will require a degree in nursing or equivalent international qualification. The courses, lasting up to four years, will meet standards developed by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the professional regulator.

Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, which helped to draw up the degree-only plans, said that losing potential nurses was “an entirely unnecessary waste of people who are willing to learn and want to care”. He added: “Of course, some people will not be suited to the demands of nursing, but with rates as high as 78 per cent, something is seriously wrong with the support offered to the nurses of the future. Financial support is very important but it is not the only kind of support that needs to be on offer.”

A Department of Health official said that an incentive scheme to pay universities with low attrition rates would start next year.

SOURCE



It was the Sun wot done it. Or was it?

Interesting to see the following article in "The Times" of London

Like it or not, it will soon be time to start placing bets for a white Christmas. If most climatologists are to be believed you are almost certainly throwing your money away.

The onward march of global warming is consigning such traditional Christmas card scenes to history. No more deep and crisp and even winters for Britain, replaced instead by damp and slush and stormy.

But, if a small group of maverick scientists are right, the chances of Yuletide snow may rise dramatically over the coming decades.

The difference of opinion hinges on what role — if any — the Sun plays in climate change. The vast majority of climate scientists maintain that the solar influence is limited or even negligible, and it is the unsustainable growth of industrialised nations that is driving the climate into chaos. The mavericks contend that the Sun’s activity dwarfs the human contribution, and that there is nothing we can do except wait for the Sun to change.

The public seems to agree with the mavericks. In a recent poll for The Times, only 41 per cent of UK voters thought the case for man-made global warning had been proved. Now, by a quirk of nature, the Sun has presented us with a golden opportunity to resolve this debate once and for all.

Satellite measurements for the past 30 years show that the Sun’s energy output has remained remarkably constant. What is changing is the level of solar activity. Solar activity governs the appearance of sunspots — dark blemishes on the solar surface. Sunspots form where magnetism reaches out from the Sun into space. In times of high solar activity, sunspots pockmark the solar surface for years and the Sun’s magnetic field balloons outwards to shield the Earth from deep space particles called cosmic rays.

According to the mavericks, cosmic rays induce clouds to form when they strike our atmosphere and low-level clouds are thought to reflect sunlight, cooling the Earth. So, when solar activity is high, the Earth is protected from cosmic rays and fewer clouds are formed. Thus, more sunlight reaches Earth’s surface and the planet heats up.

But how to prove this? During the 20th century, solar activity rose steadily, as did the amount of industrial gases being pumped into the atmosphere. With both quantities rising, it has been impossible to distinguish between them. Now, that has all changed.

In the past 12 months solar activity has fallen to levels unseen since the 1920s. Sunspots have become rare sights and for three quarters of this year the Sun has been spot-free. According to one study if the trend continues at its current rate, the Sun will lose its ability to produce sunspots by 2015. That would take it back to its condition in the latter 17th century, when hardly any sunspots appeared for 70 years — and Northern Europe underwent the worst years of the so-called Little Ice Age.

Winter scenes from this period were romanticised by artists such as Brueghel painting frost fairs and hunting scenes. But was the 17th century sunspot crash responsible for the Little Ice Age or a coincidence? Could we now find ourselves plunged into a similar freeze if the sunspots do not return?

The answer to the latter is, presumably, yes if the Sun is solely responsible for climate change; no if the mainstream is correct and solar influence is negligible. With this in mind, tonight in Bruges, I am chairing a public debate for the sixth annual European Space Weather Week between world authorities on solar variability who represent all sides of this discussion and have differing opinions about the Sun’s influence on climate. Topping the agenda is the sunspot crash and the opportunity that it presents. The plunging solar activity level will effectively remove the solar influence on climate change. If we are vigilant and honest about any slowdown in warming, its amount will tell us exactly how much the Sun was contributing.

The smart money is on the level of solar contribution being somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, both solar activity and industrial gases play a role. There is credible scientific work that ascribes up to a third of current warming to solar influence. Studies show that the Earth’s temperature mirrored solar activity until the 1980s. Then the number of sunspots stabilised but the temperature continued to rise. In other words, something overtook the Sun as the primary driver of the Earth’s temperature. That is generally thought to be industrial gases.

Now the test can be made. It is time for all sides to put away the rivalry and begin to work together. Observations must be made, experiments performed and all data must be published, not cherry-picked. This golden opportunity to reach consensus must not be squandered.

Above all, we must not let any downturn in temperatures be used as an excuse by reluctant nations to wriggle out of pollution controls. Just as certainly as the solar activity has gone away, so it will return. If we have done nothing in the interim to curb man-made global warming, we will be in worse trouble than ever.

SOURCE



Elevating environmentalism over ‘less worthy’ lifestyles

The legal ruling that a belief in climate change is similar to a religious conviction seriously damages science, philosophy and democracy

Some scientists are bemused that a British judge has decided that a strong belief in alarmist climate-change scenarios ought to be awarded the status of religious faith. Following a judge’s decision at a UK employment tribunal that Tim Nicholson, a sustainability officer who was sacked from a property firm, was entitled to legal protection for his ‘philosophical belief’ in climate change, scientists have been expressing their shock. ‘As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming’, said Myles Allen, who heads the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford (1).

Allen’s concerns are entirely understandable. Since the rise of the modern era, science has prided itself on its capacity to explain the world on the basis of experimentation, research and, above all, hard evidence. Science emerged, self-consciously, as an alternative to worldviews based on faith, moral conviction and other forms of a priori thought. So it is natural that a genuine scientist would feel insulted by the judge Sir Michael Burton’s ruling that Nicholson’s concern with climate change qualified as a ‘philosophical belief’ under the Religion and Belief Regulations 2003.

One reason why Allen and some of his colleagues are concerned about this decision is that it actually serves to undermine the pre-eminent authority of science today. In the twenty-first century, science has a near monopoly on authorising claims about virtually every aspect of human experience. We are far more interested in what ‘science says’ than in what ‘God says’. Consequently, even those who are sceptical about science and the scientific method will nevertheless mobilise these things to support their arguments. Not long ago, in the 1970s and 80s, leading environmentalists insisted that science was undemocratic, that it was responsible for many of the problems facing the planet. Now, in public at least, their hostility towards science has given way to their embrace and endorsement of science. The global warming lobby depends on the legitimation provided by scientific evidence and expertise.

However, if science is recast by a legal ruling as simply a moral or religious worldview, then its pre-eminent authority is likely to be compromised. What is to distinguish science from quacks with strongly held principles?

The erosion of the line between science and moralising has not simply been brought about by one eccentric judge. In recent times more than a few scientists have found it difficult to resist the temptation to cross the line into domain of public moralising. Take the case of Professor David Nutt, the expert recently sacked from the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. As a scientist, he is entitled to point to evidence which unequivocally calls into question the government’s policy on drugs. But Nutt is not prepared to confine his role to that of a disinterested scientist; he also wants to be a moral crusader fighting against the scourge of alcohol.

‘I want parents to know alcohol will kill your kids, not ecstasy’, said Nutt last week, before insisting that the minimum drinking age should be increased to 21 (2). Nutt obviously has strong views on the subject of the minimum age of drinking, but these views are based on his personal moral attitude, not on science. The way in which Nutt can quite easily make a conceptual leap from scientific evidence to the domain of moral and political decision-making is symptomatic of a powerful trend today: the transformation of science into an ideology, if not a dogma.

Indeed, science often has the quality of a quasi-religious dogma these days, especially in the arena of climate-change alarmism. ‘The scientists have spoken’, says one British-based green campaign group, in an updated version of the religious phrase: ‘This is the Word of the Lord.’ ‘This is what the science says we must do’, many greens claim, before adding that the debate about global warming is ‘finished’.

As I have argued previously on spiked, campaigners against climate change frequently prefix the term science with the definite article, ‘the’. So Sir David Read, a former vice president of the prestigious scientific institution the Royal Society, stated: ‘The science very clearly points towards the need for us all – nations, businesses and individuals – to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.’ (3) Unlike ‘science’, this new term – ‘The Science’ – is a deeply moralised and politicised category. Today, those who claim to wield the authority of The Science are really demanding unquestioning submission. The legal ruling that someone’s belief in the behaviour modification demanded by climate-change activists should have the status of a religious conviction shows how much The Science now influences Britain’s legal culture.

Although some scientists feel insulted that their views on climate change have been equated with a religion, there are many green activists who are more than happy to recruit the support of God to their cause. One blogger says ‘thinking about environmentalism as if it were a religion is an interesting way to go’. Why? Because religion ‘looks a lot more successful at achieving its aim worldwide than the environmental movement’ (4). Tim Nicholson wants to have both God and Science on his team. After the judgement he noted that ‘my moral and ethical values are similar to those promoted by many of the world’s religions’. However, he also added that ‘the difference is mine are not faith-based or spiritual, but grounded in overwhelming scientific evidence’.

Whether this ‘philosophy’ presents itself as science with a bit of religion, or as a religion based on science, appears to be a matter of personal opinion amongst campaigners, all of whom seem to believe that their cause is far too important for them to worry about opportunistic inconsistencies in argumentation.

Giving philosophy a bad name

When the law was changed to protect people from discrimination at work on the basis of their beliefs, many humanist and secular commentators believed this was a positive step forward. And some argued that philosophical beliefs ought to be accorded the same rights as religious beliefs. Unfortunately, what many supporters of the change in the law did not grasp was that if secular views were also transformed into ‘weighty and substantial’ beliefs, they would in effect become a form of pseudo-religion. This development is particularly striking in the way in which philosophy has been recast as religion-lite.

From the standpoint of Mr Justice Burton, adherence to climate-change theory is a philosophical belief because it is a view that is genuinely and deeply held. But where is the philosophy in all this? It is possible to argue that climate-change theory is inspired by a distinct epistemology and teleology and influenced by ethical and moral concerns. But in and of itself the belief in recycling and reducing consumption is not a philosophy.

Philosophy raises fundamental questions about the meaning of human existence. It engages with fundamental issues that underpin the sciences and public debate. Strictly speaking, the term ‘philosophical belief’ makes little sense, because philosophy is principally devoted to the task of asking questions and speculating about things, rather than providing answers. Philosophy is devoted to the quest for the truth in its quest for wisdom. It is not a secular form of religion. It does not rely on religious revelation for guidance, nor does it thrive when its search for answers is compromised by an adherence to a priori beliefs.

Such beliefs may arise out of a philosophical inquiry, but these beliefs do not constitute a philosophy as such. The term that Mr Justice Burton is really looking for to describe the beliefs and behaviour of climate-change crusaders is not philosophy or religion, but lifestyle.

The sacralisation of lifestyle

The decision to provide environmentalist arguments with the protection of the law, in a manner akin to that afforded to religion, demonstrates that the legal and political elites have lost their way. But it is important not to take too seriously the arguments used to support this decision. Strongly held moral views about the conduct of life have never been the essence of religions alone. In previous times, such sentiments informed political ideals and cultural movements. Today, the beliefs and practices advocated by Nicholson are part of his lifestyle. Yes, we take our lifestyles very seriously: what we eat, how we look or travel and whom we sleep with define many people’s identities. But in a world where there are a multitude of lifestyles, all of which have assumed great significance, it is not possible to treat them all as quasi-religions.

To qualify for protection under the Equality and Employment (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, a philosophical belief must be ‘genuinely held’, be about a ‘weighty and substantial’ aspect of human experience, possess ‘seriousness, cohesion and importance’, and be ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’. This last point is most significant. Who decides which strongly held view is ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’? Certainly our legal and cultural elites have clear assumptions about which views are worthy of respect, and which are not. So last week we discovered that, under new proposals from the New Labour government, parents who are hostile to the provision of sex education in schools are not ‘worthy of respect’ despite the fact that their views are informed by genuine and deeply held convictions – their ability to withdraw their children from sex-education classes will be restricted.

Some forms of lifestyles are protected, or at least sacralised, by law, while others are stigmatised. So Christians who, in keeping with their beliefs, refuse to perform same-sex marriages are unlikely to gain legal protection, even though they express traditionally recognised religious convictions. However, those whose conscience does not allow them fly on Ryanair will now enjoy legal privileges and dispensation that are not accorded to their morally inferior colleagues. The sacralisation of elite-approved lifestyles creates a double standard that directly contradicts democratic norms.

Those who hold strongly held environmentalist views even have a semi-official mandate to break the law these days. Protesters against genetically modified (GM) food or nuclear power are often represented as idealist young people who are acting on ‘everyone’s behalf’. In truth, being part of the British political oligarchy, they have the kind of freedom to protest that is usually denied to ordinary mortals. That is why such protesters who break the law often face a sympathetic court hearing and win ‘not guilty’ verdicts (see State-sanctioned radicalism, by Brendan O’Neill).

So when Lord Melchett, the aristocratic former leader of Greenpeace, was arrested for criminal damage and theft after taking part in a protest against GM crops, he was genuinely shocked by his treatment. As far as he was concerned, his action was a ‘direct expression of “people’s power”’. Greenpeace, the self-appointed voice of the British people, described its action as an exercise in ‘active citizenship’ which ‘keeps democracy healthy and responsive’.

Melchett, like many other leading lobbyists, has an elitist notion of democracy, one driven by a conviction that, if they believe that something is wrong, then waiting for an unresponsive political system to do something about it is a luxury that society cannot afford. Professional environmental protesters assume that they have the moral authority to take matters into their own hands, since they are acting on behalf of The People. They believe that their unique philosophical insights entitle them to special dispensation. Now, Mr Justice Burton has effectively agreed with them, elevating environmentalism over other, inferior, less ‘worthy’ beliefs – and democracy is all the more impoverished for it.

SOURCE



Christmas could be killed off by Britain's far-Left Equality Bill

Christmas celebrations could be banned under Harriet Harman's controversial Equality Bill, Roman Catholic bishops warned yesterday. They fear the complex legislation will have the 'chilling effect' of town halls and other organisations clamping down on festivities for fear of offending other cultures.

Monsignor Andrew Summersgill, the general secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, has written to MPs to say it will fuel Britain's 'risk-averse' culture. He pointed to bizarre decisions in recent years including the banning of decorations and renaming of Oxford's Christmas festival as the 'Winter Light Festival' to make it more inclusive.

The letter, part of the evidence being considered by the Parliamentary committee examining the Bill, said: 'Under existing legislation, we have seen the development of a risk-averse culture with outcomes as ridiculous as reports of a local authority instructing tenants to take down Christmas lights in case they might offend Muslim neighbours, or of authorities removing the word Christmas out of cultural sensitivity to everyone except Christians. 'If this Bill is serious about equality, everything possible must be done to avoid it having a chilling effect on religious expression and practice.'

The proposed Bill being championed by Labour deputy leader Miss Harman aims to strengthen protection for minority groups by forcing public bodies to give them more opportunities. It also contains measures aimed at closing the gender pay gap.

But senior Catholics have also complained that religious groups will be forced to accept homosexual youth workers, secretaries and other staff even if their faith holds same-sex relationships to be sinful.

Christian organisations fear that the law will undermine the integrity of churches and dilute their moral message.

The letter by the bishops adds: 'The Catholic Church has significant concerns about the practical implications of some parts of the Bill.'

A spokesman for the Government Equalities Office denied the Bill would impact on Christmas. He said: 'That's ridiculous; of course local councils can still put up Christmas tree lights or mark any other religious ceremony such as Diwali, Eid or Ramadan.'

The BBC's governing body has rejected calls to allow non-religious voices to be heard on Radio 4's Thought For The Day. Complaints had been made that banning secularists, atheists or humanists broke the corporation's impartiality guidelines and amounted to 'religious force feeding'. But yesterday the BBC Trust ruled that limiting the slot to religious views did not represent a breach of its rules. It added that Thought For The Day was properly signposted, well known for what it did, and neither misleading nor inaccurate.

SOURCE



British government advisers rethink calorie counting

Once again what was wisdom yesterday is wrong today

Slimmers, rejoice — those forbidden sweet treats or extra bags of crisps may no longer be off-limits. Scientists advising the Government say that the calorie counts used as the basis of diet plans and healthy-eating advice for the past 18 years may be wrong.

According to a draft report by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), the recommended daily intake of calories — currently 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men — could be increased by up to 16 per cent, suggesting that some adults could safely consume an extra 400 calories a day (equivalent to an average-sized cheeseburger, or two bags of ready-salted crisps).

The committee, made up of some of Britain’s leading nutritional experts, says that its report provides a much more accurate assessment of how energy can be burnt off through physical activity.

However, health campaigners and consumer experts warned that the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) could seek to “sweep this report under the carpet”, as it could send out mixed messages in the middle of a [non-existent] obesity epidemic.

Ministers are considering the introduction of new food-labelling schemes that would highlight the calorie content of foods relative to guideline daily amounts (GDAs). Industry sources expressed concern that revising figures and estimates on which the GDAs were based could cause confusion among consumers and mistrust of scientific advice. The FSA has been evaluating for two years new methods of labelling, including a “traffic light” scheme to colour-code unhealthy food. Existing guidelines on energy intake required for good health have formed the basis of food labelling and dietary advice from doctors and nutritionists since 1991. If the committee’s proposals are accepted some foods would be upgraded to a healthier rating.

The draft proposals, seen by The Times and The Grocer magazine, are due to go out for a 14-week consultation before final recommendations are made. The report comes two weeks after the Government’s chief drugs advisor was sacked by the Home Secretary for “crossing a line” by publicly criticising existing policy.

About 60 per cent of British adults are overweight or obese, with growth in the nation’s waistlines being blamed on sedentary lifestyles as well as excessive eating. The cost of overweight and obese individuals to the NHS is estimated to be £4.2 billion a year [Rubbish! People of middling weight are healthier than either skinnies or fatties] and the Department of Health has pledged to cut levels of childhood obesity partly through its £375 million “Change4Life” strategy.

Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said it was a “dangerous assumption” to say that adults could safely consume an extra 400 calories a day. “This is not a green light to eat yourself silly,” he said.

The last significant study on energy use, carried out by the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy in 1991, was based on observational studies, with students being shut in a room for a week having their breathing measured, a method prone to underestimating “normal” levels of physical activity. SACN assessed studies using the Double Labelled Water technique, which measures how much carbon dioxide the body has produced converted into equivalent values of energy.

Adam Leyland, editor of The Grocer, said: “The ramifications for the industry are significant, to say the least. All the UK’s labelling schemes, including GDAs and traffic lights, are based around the 1991 energy report.”

SOURCE



British gun madness: "A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty". Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year. The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon. In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested. I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets." The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden. In his statement, he said: "I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges. "I didn't know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him. "At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall." Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells. The legal explanation for this fiasco is that possession of a gun without a permit is a 'strict liability' offense (ie there are no excuses) which carries a mandatory (ah yes, those mandatory minimums again...) sentence of at least five years. The real explanation is, of course, that the law is insane."

British speed camera INCREASES crashes: "A motorway speed camera responsible for raking in more than a million dollars in fines has been blamed for increasing accidents since it was installed. The camera, which monitors a busy stretch of the M11 near London, results in 9000 tickets a year, but figures released by police show crashes have risen by a quarter at the site. A Freedom of Information request made by campaigners who oppose what they see as revenue-based penalty tickets also showed casualties have almost doubled since 2001 when the camera was set up. Paul Pearson, who runs motoring website penaltychargenotice.co.uk, said: 'No wonder they haven't removed the camera that is causing these accidents. 'It is just raising too much money and they clearly want to keep it there.' The data showed that in the five years before the camera was installed, there were 13 accidents and 14 casualties in the area. In the following five years, the number of accidents rose to 16 and casualties to 24." [In the usual British way "safety" is the rationale for such cameras but that is clearly not the real motive]



British rail travel: "A tour of the worst stations in the country was never going to be a glamorous or uplifting assignment. Pretty soon it turned into an exercise in extreme travel. Mine was an odyssey of wind-swept platforms and urine-soaked floors. Old ladies struggled over footbridges, travellers shivered in the elements as they waited to get home. They talked of parking rage and waiting for taxis in the rain. Many refused to use the fetid facilities. It became a journey of headaches and hunger; inedible food provided from vending machines. There was the stench of disinfectant, rubber floors that gave the feel of hospital waiting rooms, peeling paint and pigeons picking through litter. Disgrace, dismal, dreadful, dingy: just some of the words my companions used to describe the stations. Britain deserves better. Surely the country that developed the first railways should aspire to an infrastructure worthy of the 21st century, not a dilapidated relic of what it had 100 years ago? Anyone who spends enough time on our trains runs the risk of falling out of love with the railway."





18 November, 2009

Fury as immigrant baby killer is paid £4,500 'bribe' to quit Britain

An immigrant convicted of the horrific killing of a 17-month-old baby has been given £4,500 by the Government as a 'bribe' to leave the country. Malaysian Agnes Wong, 29, was jailed for five years in 2008 for the brutal manslaughter of a toddler she was supposed to be child-minding. She was let out of prison in July this year, and two weeks ago was put on a plane at Heathrow and sent to Malaysia with a 'voucher' worth £4,500 to spend when she got there.

Wong was jailed after a court heard how she had swung the boy, Hugo Wang, by his ankles and smashed his head. He died of brain injuries.

Wong's payment has sparked disbelief and outrage, coming just days after the Prime Minister said he understood the public's mounting concerns over immigration.

Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said: 'Only last week, Gordon Brown said he "gets it" on immigration but this is proof he doesn't get it. For an immigrant who killed a child to get taxpayers' money to help with her future life is nothing short of appalling.' Mr Green demanded to know why Wong had not been automatically deported without a penny of public money. 'Even while Labour repeatedly boasted about introducing automatic deportation for people like this, it now appears they have been using public money to help people get round that very system,' he said.

The horrific story of Hugo's last hours caused national revulsion when Wong's sadistic behaviour was exposed in court. The unregistered childminder, who came to the UK in 2003, was paid £120 a week to look after Hugo in her home in Salford, Greater Manchester, while the boy's parents worked 16 to 20 hours a day to make ends meet. She was accused of waging a 'regime of terror' against him, torturing him with a hairdryer and hitting him so hard with a ruler that it snapped. Hugo died in January 2007, a day after he was taken, unconscious, to hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. He had been struck with such force that his brain had shifted in his skull and caused internal bleeding. Doctors also found bite and burn marks on his body.

Wong, who denied murder, was found guilty of manslaughter but was sentenced in May 2008 to just five years in prison. The Mail on Sunday has now learned that Wong served only the minimum jail term of two-and-half years, including her time in custody before and during the trial.

Just two weeks ago, she was deported to Malaysia under a controversial 'Facilitated Returns Scheme' under which foreign prisoners are paid up to £5,000 if they agree to leave the UK as early as possible without fighting their deportation using human-rights laws or by claiming asylum. So far, around 1,000 have left the UK and been given the money.

It is not known for certain whether Wong - who used the anglicised name Agnes, although her Malaysian name is Siew Teng - entered Britain legally or illegally. However, any immigrant who commits a serious crime can forfeit their right to remain in Britain and can be deported.

David Wood, the UK Border Agency's director of criminality and detention, defended the scheme, saying: 'We don't want foreign criminals in the UK. Every day that we can get these individuals out of the country early removes the risk they present to UK citizens and saves our taxpayers more than £100 a night in detention costs as well as administrative and court costs.'

As Wong boarded a plane at Heathrow on November 2 bound for Kuala Lumpur, immigration officials handed her a letter confirming that she was entitled to a 'reintegration fund' payout of up to £4,500. The letter informed her that the money, provided by UK taxpayers but administered by an international migration organisation, could be 'invested' in training for a new job, housing, education, medical treatment or to help set up a small business. The letter - seen by The Mail on Sunday - also advised Wong, who was kept in an immigration detention centre between her release from jail in July and her deportation earlier this month, how to claim the money.

Hugo's parents, who were immigrants from China, both worked at the China City restaurant in Southport, where Liverpool football star Steven Gerrard is a regular. Friends have now spoken of how Hugo's father, Jian Lin Situ, never got over the death of his son and how he had taken the baby's ashes back to China. They also voiced their anger that the boy's killer would get thousands of pounds of public money to build a new life. One said: 'It is an absolute disgrace that she has got this money. That sort of money will go a long way in Malaysia.'

The friend recalled how Hugo's father had been distraught to learn that some of his son's body parts were initially retained by the coroner in case Wong appealed against her conviction. 'When Hugo died it was big in all the newspapers in China. We followed the proceedings and were all horrified by what happened to that poor boy,' said the friend. 'Jian and Hugo's mother Zhen split up soon after. I think they both blamed each other for their son's death.

'I think Zhen went back to China. Jian never got over Hugo's death. He was absolutely devastated. He took Hugo's ashes back to China, to the Canton district, the family's ancestral home. After that, Jian moved on to a restaurant in Liverpool. From there he went to another restaurant in Blackburn and we lost touch.'

The friend added that Mr Situ would be 'horrified' to learn that Wong had already been returned home, especially as he protested that she should originally have been given a 15-year jail sentence. 'Jian thought five years was too lenient. This is just an insult to Hugo's memory. What are they playing at, letting her out so early? They should have thrown away the key.'

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think-tank, said: 'It is absolutely wrong in principle that criminals who thoroughly deserve to be deported should be paid for going. This should not happen at all.'

A Home Office official confirmed there were two other voluntary schemes offering illegal immigrants incentives to return: one for individuals in the asylum system paying up to £4,000; and one for immigrants who have no right to be here but have not claimed asylum, paying out a maximum of £1,000.

SOURCE



British Alzheimer’s patients neglected and come out of hospital 'worse than when they went in'

Half of Alzheimer’s patients come out of hospital in worse health than when they went in because of poor care, a hard-hitting new report warns. One in three never go back to their own homes and are discharged to a nursing home instead, the Alzheimer’s Society found. More than three-quarters of relatives say that they are dissatisfied with the treatment dementia patients receive in hospital and one in three has made an official complaint.

Poor care leads them to spend weeks or even months longer than necessary in hospital, according to the charity, which called for a target to cut the average time to discharge by a week.

The report come just days after an independent investigation found that almost 2,000 dementia patients a year are being killed by ‘chemical cosh’ drugs given to keep them quiet. A survey of relatives and NHS staff shows that almost half, 47 per cent, of dementia patients left hospital in worse physical health than when they went in. In an even greater number of cases, 54 per cent, the patients’ dementia was judged to have deteriorated while in hospital.

The charity warned that patients were being left unfed, with nothing to drink or sitting in their own urine because staff did not realise Alzheimer’s patients need extra help with simple tasks. Patients suffered weight loss, dehydration, pressure sores, incontinence and were even left unable to walk because they had been confined to bed for too long. One distressed patient was found beside a written note telling her “Don’t bang the table”, despite the fact that her condition meant she could no longer read.

Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “We are talking about an issue that is vast and staring the NHS in the face. “We believe that the NHS is failing disgracefully on this. “And it is creating very serious outcomes for people with dementia and their families.”

People with dementia occupy up to one in four NHS hospital beds at any one time, the charity estimates. Cutting the average length of hospital stay by one week could save the NHS at least £80 million a year.

Official figures show that while the average length of stay for a hip fracture was one week, almost one in eight dementia patients with hip fractures stayed in hospital for more than two months.

The charity insisted that while in some cases it was right that patients with the condition should spend longer in hospital in many there were being delayed unnecessarily, harming their health. The charity surveyed 1,291 friends and relatives caring for a patient with dementia, 657 nursing staff and 479 ward managers.

Around 700,000 people in Britain have dementia, 400,000 with Alzheimer’s, the most common for, of the condition. That figure is predicted to increase to 1.7 million by 2051, in part because of an ageing population.

Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “For the majority of patients with dementia to leave hospital in a worse condition than when they arrived is simply unacceptable. "It is vital that the government invests in better dementia training for all healthcare staff to ensure these patients receive good quality care."

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: “This is a wake-up call for a health system that has failed to take the challenge of dementia seriously. “We must tackle dementia by investing in research to find new preventions, treatments and cures, as well as reforming the way hospitals deal with dementia patients.”

A spokesman for the Patients' Association said: "The findings in this report are scandalous. "Not enough help with eating. Not enough help with drinking. Not enough help with personal hygiene. Not enough help with continence. “There is now an overwhelming amount of evidence that elderly patients are being neglected in hospitals across the NHS. "Whether they have dementia or not, if they are in need of help with personal care many of them won’t get it. “Ensuring patients receive essential personal care doesn’t tick any of the target boxes. Is it any surprise that it has slipped so dramatically?”

Phil Hope, the care services minister, said: "We have set priority areas for all hospitals to take urgent action, including appointing a senior member of staff to improve quality of care for people with dementia, proper training for all staff, and specialist older people's mental health teams working in hospitals.”

SOURCE



Bureaucratic madness: British IVF couples face disease tests before each cycle

Couples undergoing IVF could face higher bills after European regulators said they should be screened for diseases between each treatment cycle. The EU Commission wants couples to be screened before each treatment cycle instead of just when they start their course. British doctors said it was extremely unlikely new cases of infections like HIV and syphilis would be picked up between cycles and it will add to the cost of treatment, which is currently around £4,000 for IVF. The move could mean couples needing to be tested every one or two months for HIV, hepatitis, Human T-lymphotropic virus and syphilis.

Dr Luca Gianaroli, chairman of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), said that at a recent meeting, the EU Commission had said all patients must be tested before each treatment and that all European countries "must comply with this and that it was not open for national interpretation". He has written to ESHRE members urging them to take action over the "quite alarming signals" over interpretation of its 2004 tissue and cell directive.

He said after 30 years of IVF, 15 million treatments and around three million children born, there had been no examples of viruses being transmitted in the areas covered by the directive. In Dr Gianaroli's letter he added: "All in all, this implies a major additional allocation of resources. "The consequence of this testing practice is that many couples living intimately together at home will have to be tested every one to two months."

At present, couples are generally tested for HIV and hepatitis before they undergo their first treatment but are then considered virus-free for the rest of their course.

Professor Peter Braude, head of the Department of Women's Health at King's College London, said: "This new interpretation of the EU directive is of extreme concern to fertility practitioners, as it will have substantial implications for the costs of fertility treatment to individual patients and for the NHS.

"Whilst we already comply with the bizarre EU idea that sperm samples from couples who have been married or cohabiting for many years are treated as 'partner donation', and men have to have infection screens done at least annually, this interpretation would mean that both partners in the relationship would now have to be tested for HIV, hepatitis, HTLV and syphilis every time they underwent an IVF or even an IUI (insemination) procedure, which could be two or three times a year or even more often. "Repeat infection or new infection during or between treatments would be extremely rare, if ever."

Dr Allan Pacey, secretary of the British Fertility Society and senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: "The British Fertility Society (BFS) has some concerns about this interpretation of the EU directive and the impact it may have on infertility treatments within the UK and across Europe. "Whilst there are a number of reasons to screen patients for some infectious agents, including HIV, it is important that the timing, frequency and screening strategy is evidence-based. "A blanket screening policy applied uncritically is unhelpful and inappropriate."

SOURCE



A new iteration of "blame the parents"

Crap research in support of interventionist conclusions. The fact that one type of parenting is associated with one type of child behaviour proves nothing. Both phenomena could be caused by a third factor -- genetic factors in particular. Genetics are very strongly related to personality (See here, for instance), so the utter ignoring of genetics in the report discussed below reveals it to be an ideological guided missile, not a work of science

A new report by the British think-tank Demos has hit the headlines, with its claim that ‘Parents are the principal architects of a fairer society’. Based on research from the Millennium Cohort Study, the report argues that how children are parented has a more significant impact upon their future life chances than just about anything else, including poverty and the social class into which they are born (1).

You might wonder whether the world really needs another report blaming particular parenting styles for every evident problem in late capitalist society. Across the British political spectrum, policy continually seeks to clobber parents over the head with the assertion that the future of Britain rests or falls according to whether they feed their children too many sweets or read to them for the requisite number of minutes at bedtime.

So when Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, authors of the Demos report, respond to concerns about interference by the ‘nanny state’ by arguing that ‘if there is one area where government intervention is justified, it is in precisely the area of life signalled by the term “nannying” – the development of children’s capabilities’, they are pushing at doors opened by New Labour, and held open by the Tories. Nothing new there.

However, Lexmond and Reeves at least try to go beyond the emotional blackmail that informs most parenting policy, which simply asserts that if you don’t adopt the right kind of parenting behaviours with your children they will die of obesity or end up on the social scrapheap, with no qualifications and a million mental disorders. Their report, Building Character, is an attempt to wrestle with the problem of how we bring up children with a sense of self and agency, who can achieve things in life and develop a responsibility to people and projects outside of themselves.

This is an important question, and one that preoccupies parents as much as policy-wonks. I have often found myself ploughing through the latest piece of official parenting advice and wondering to what end it all leads. The idea that rearing children is just about maximising their ‘happiness’, or stopping them from becoming fat, or enabling them to take a few calculated risks, might all make some sense on a personal, daily level, but it seems thoroughly inadequate in terms of a generational project.

When we say ‘children are the future’, we don’t just mean that they will outlive us, but that they will be the ones running society and making history. To that extent, it really is not enough that they are happy or that they have high self-esteem – they have to be able to cope with adversity and think outside of themselves, in order to shape the world around them. This is where character comes into play, and where adults’ role in helping to ‘build character’ is crucially important.

Unfortunately, while Demos’ enthusiasm for addressing this issue is refreshing, its narrow focus on parenting styles and outcomes among young children means that the report ends up peddling the same old mixture of common sense and nonsense. On the common sense front, it finds that more authoritative parents have better-behaved children and that more confident parents are more authoritative. On the nonsense front, it speculates that better-behaved children with more confident parents will get to be middle class when they reach adulthood – which leads to the conclusion that training parents on low incomes to be confident and authoritative will magic some social mobility into their children. Or, as Jen Lexmond told The Sunday Times, ‘when it comes to parenting, it is not what you are, but what you do that’s important’ (2).

What is striking about this is not only the blithe assertion that all manner of social inequalities and life problems can be obliterated by parents simply setting a few house rules for their toddlers. It is the reduction of a child’s moral development, the building of character that takes place over the course of childhood within a distinct cultural context, to a particular parenting style that results in clearly observable attributes amongst five-year-olds.

Building Character starts with a discussion of Aristotle; eight pages later it presents us with a table showing how three ‘key character capabilities’ are exhibited by the behaviour of five-year-olds studied by the Millennium Cohort Study. So we find that a child who ‘cannot sit still, is constantly fidgeting or squirming’ shows something about ‘application’, a child who is kind to younger children shows something about ‘empathy and attachment’, and a child who ‘often argues with adults’ shows something about ‘self-regulation’. The child who exhibits the good behaviours is presumed to be a product of authoritative parenting, and will go far in life; the restless hypochondriac tantrummer is presumed to be lacking boundaries and will end up socially immobile.

An expert in survey methodology could no doubt find several holes in this research. I was struck by the admission, in the appendix, that for all the authors argued that confident parents make better-behaved (or more character-ful) children, ‘It is possible that the association between parental perceived competence and child behaviour outcomes is spurious’ – as the data was based on parents’ reports of their children’s behaviour, and less confident parents tend to report more bad behaviour in their children than do more confident parents. It seems equally possible that the report’s entire evidence base is ‘spurious’.

But aside from that, why do we think we can measure something so complex and human as ‘character’ by looking at the behaviour of five-year-olds? Can human agency really be reduced to an ability to concentrate and a willingness to share toys?

As a parent, I worry about the development of my children’s characters. I worry about the impact of a purportedly child-centred therapy culture, which encourages children to think that that they should never be criticised and that their feelings are the most important ones. I worry that children who are over-protected, who are not allowed to take risks or work through problems for themselves, are profoundly ill-equipped to become adults capable of running the world. I worry that the educational direction taken by ‘personalised learning’ and methods that make everything fun and relevant to children limits their capacity to apply themselves to things.

I worry about the way that anti-bullying initiatives actively discourage children from developing empathy, by presenting bullying as the use of certain bad words or particular actions, rather than encouraging children to think about what it means to be kind or unkind, how to roll with the blows and how to maintain friendships. I worry that precisely the model of ‘good parenting’ that is advocated by policymakers is that of the active consumer – the parent who elbows everybody else out of the way to achieve the best for his or her child, who is obsessively anxious about the individuals within his or her family to the exclusion of thinking about what’s best for the school, the community, even other friends and family members. And I worry about lots of other things as well.

But, as the parent of a five-year-old and a three-year-old, I know that their characters are not yet fully formed. There are several years and many experiences left in order to inspire and shape young children into the kind of adults we hope they will become. As children gain the ability to read, reason and expand their world beyond the home, we can engage them in questions of agency and morality, and trust them to work things out for themselves but in relation to other people.

The idea that parents alone can – even should – short-circuit these processes by seeking to ‘develop character’ by the end of five, and that we can measure our children’s worth as moral, responsible beings according to whether they sit still at the dinner table, displays a narrow and deterministic view. Character is not an ‘outcome measure’, and obedience is not what makes us human.

SOURCE



Does Britain's Green craziness ever stop?

Greenies used to LIKE trees once

Britain is set to plunder the lungs of the world to feed its growing hunger for wood to burn in power stations. A series of biomass-fired plants are being built in the UK that will trigger a 150 per cent surge in timber imports from 20 million tonnes today to 50 million tonnes by 2015, according to the Forestry Commission. British power plants are already shipping wood from Canada, Brazil, Scandinavia and South Korea.

Just one of the new biomass plants at Port Talbot, South Wales, will consume three million tonnes of wood per year — equivalent to 30 per cent of the UK’s domestic annual wood harvest of ten million tonnes. But the plant, which is due to open in 2012, will generate only 300 megawatt hours of electricity, or about 0.4 per cent of the UK's current power-generating capacity. At least four more 300-megawatt plants are planned, including three in Yorkshire that have been proposed by Drax, operator of Britain’s largest coal-fired power station. Another company, MGT, plans to build one on Teesside.

A spokesman for Prenergy, which is behind the Port Talbot plant, said 90 per cent of its wood supplies would be imported, although he insisted that all of it would be sourced from proven sustainable sources.

Nevertheless, environmental campaigners have raised concerns about the carbon emissions involved in shipping the wood such large distances, while to meet UK pest control laws the timber will need to be baked before it can be shipped to the UK.

Wood industry officials have warned that British families could face soaring prices for a range of wood-based products, including furniture, wood panels and even wallpaper because of its impact on low-grade timber and wood pulp prices. “It’s going to push timber prices through the roof,” said Gavin Adkins, chairman of the Wood Panel Industry Federation. He is concerned that large parts of the £1 billion industry that rely on wood as its main raw material will be forced offshore.

Although wood prices have moderated during the recession, rapid growth in demand had led to a 25 per cent rise since 2007, Mr Adkins said. “We operate in a low-margin industry and our ability to absorb such increases in raw material costs is limited. Inevitably these costs will have to be passed on to the consumer. Obviously, the timing could not be worse for the construction industry, which has been seriously hit in this recession.”

He said the number of jobs that may be lost was causing concerns for companies in the saw-milling, wood-panel and paper and pulp industries. The federation is lobbying for the biomass industry, which is supported by a government subsidy regime, to be given extra incentives to use waste wood instead of virgin timber for fuel. An estimated 4.5 million tonnes of waste wood are landfilled in the UK each year, according to government estimates.

A recent report from the Environment Agency stated that shipping timber from overseas could halve the potential carbon dioxide savings from biomass power.

SOURCE



Girls ‘can follow fashion without compromising intelligence’

Comments from the Head of a British private school

Young women can dress provocatively and be interested in fashion without compromising their intelligence or feminist principles, a leading head teacher said yesterday. Jill Berry, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, defended Cambridge undergraduates who posed in their underwear for an online student magazine last month. “Girls can be highly intelligent and interested in being seen to be attractive — the two aren’t mutually exclusive,” Mrs Berry told a conference of girls’ school head teachers. “Caring about physical appearance and fashion and wanting to feel good about how you look doesn’t have to be a betrayal of some feminist ideal. I love new shoes but it doesn’t make me shallow.”

One of the Cambridge students who posed in a bikini asked last month for her photograph to be removed from The Tab, a student internet site, after the student union women’s officer said that they reinforced harmful attitudes towards women. But Mrs Berry said: “I don’t think that has to be a conflict. I am saying it is about balance and not pigeonholing us.”

She also spoke up for Cambridge students who have formed a cheerleading team, saying that she had started a cheerleading team at her own school, Dame Alice Harpur School in Bedford. “It is really quite skilful — it involves gymnastics and dance. And they are loving it,” she said.

Mrs Berry, who said last week that girls should not feel guilty if they opted out of a high-flying career to focus on having a family , admitted that there were other head teachers who disagreed but said she welcomed the “raging debate” triggered by her remarks. “I am absolutely sure that there will be people who say we have to be careful about this message,” she said. “There should be women at the top of every profession and should be more women as managing directors at FTSE level. “I think sometimes women choose not to have these things. It is not that they can’t, or that they have tried and failed. There are women who say, ‘At this stage of my life that is not what I want for myself, for my family, for my life’.”

Addressing the annual conference of the Girls’ Schools Association, she said that schools were increasingly having to deal with the obsessive use of social networking sites and online bullying. Coping with the addictive nature of online networking sites, internet safety and cyber bullying had overtaken conventional parental concerns such as homework, friendships and exam stress, she said.

A straw poll of issues of concern among the association’s 187 independent girls’ schools put online networking, internet dangers and online bullying top “by some margin”. They had overtaken problems in face-to-face relationships at school. Websites where girls could post abusive and anonymous messages about their peers were a particular problem, she told the conference in Harrogate. “The reason these are such issues for girls is that they care so much more about relationships with their peers than boys generally do,” Mrs Berry said....

SOURCE



British view: Not enough censorship of climate debate in Australia

It's all about double standards and fashions. When Tom Schieffer, the former US ambassador to Australia, interfered in the domestic debate by criticising Labor's Mark Latham in 2003, he was rebuked by some commentators for undiplomatic behaviour. Fair enough.

Last week Baroness Valerie Amos, who recently became Britain's high commissioner, also intervened in Australian politics. She expressed surprise that there was a debate in Australia about whether humans are the principal cause of climate change and added: "In the UK there is a degree of political consensus about what in broad terms needs to be done … You would certainly not see on a daily basis … the kind of negative reporting that you have here."

Amos evoked a modern cliche and suggested that it was time, on this matter, that Australia "moved on". Put simply, Amos wants there to be no debate whatsoever about human-induced climate change and, to the extent to which this takes place, she wants the media to refrain from reporting it. It seems that platitudes are handed down in the British high commission in Canberra.

Helen Liddell, Amos' immediate predecessor, delivered a similar lecture at the National Press Club in April 2007 - not long before the federal election of that year in which climate change was a matter of contention.

How come, then, that Schieffer's comments on Australian politics caused offence whereas those by Liddell and Amos passed virtually without criticism? Well, Schieffer is not only a conservative but a friend of George Bush who supported American policy in Iraq. Liddell was a Labour MP from 1994 to 2005 and became a minister in Tony Blair's government. And Amos was appointed to the House of Lords by Blair in 1997 becoming a minister and, later, leader of the House of Lords. Moreover, both Liddell and Amos believe in the most fashionable cause of the modern age - namely that human behaviour is responsible for global warming.

So it seems that there is one rule for conservative Americans Down Under who want to talk publicly about Iraq. And quite another rule for social democratic Brits who want to talk publicly about climate change. Last September, shortly before she left Australia, Liddell appeared on ABC1's Q&A program and used the occasion to lecture the audience about emission trading schemes. It is most unlikely that the Australian high commissioner in London would appear on the BBC Question Time program and lecture the British on, say, how to run an economy.

The British high commission's lecture-at-large to the Australian population invariably overlooks two central facts. First, British carbon emissions are low because, when Margaret Thatcher was conservative prime minister in the 1980s, the coalmines were allowed to close down. This policy was not continued when John Major succeeded Thatcher.

This was done in the face of opposition from British Labour, the radical leftist National Union of Mineworkers and assorted Guardian-New Statesman reading inner-city luvvies. Had this lot had their way, the British taxpayer would have been forced to subsidise dirty British coal and Australians would have been spared the subsequent moralising of such former Labour parliamentarians as Liddell and Amos. At the meeting of the United Kingdom-Australia Leadership Forum in Canberra in 2006, John Howard mentioned that on his first flight to Britain as prime minister he had watched the film Brassed Off, which depicted the anger at the wind-up of the British coal industry, and joked that he had been impressed by the impassioned speeches delivered by Thatcher's opponents at the time. Tony Blair joined in the humour, declaring that he might have delivered one of these orations himself. By then, of course, Blair was more interested in the reduction of carbon pollution.

The second reason why Britain has relatively low carbon emissions turns on the fact that it has a nuclear power industry. As its Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, announced recently, Gordon Brown's Government intends to begin the construction of up to 10 nuclear power stations.

It is true that there is little debate in the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in Britain about the cause of climate change. Perhaps this explains why it is not as high profile an issue as in Australia. Meanwhile, the Americans seemed subsumed in the debates on health insurance and the war in Afghanistan. That's why - contrary to many predictions - President Barack Obama will not take a firm carbon pollution reduction proposal to the Copenhagen conference early next month. Within the OECD, the Australian economy most resembles that of the US and Canada. The US did not ratify the Kyoto Agreement - not even when Al Gore was vice president in Bill Clinton's administration. Canada signed up to Kyoto - but never got close to meeting its targets. Australia did not ratify Kyoto under Howard, but met its targets.

Quite a few members of the European Union have not met their Kyoto targets. Perhaps the likes of Liddell and Amos might have more effect by taking their climate change diplomatic advocacy to Ottawa or Brussels.

The Rudd Government is attempting to get a carbon pollution reduction scheme through the Senate before Copenhagen. If he does, well and good. If he doesn't, Australia's situation will be no different from that of the US. In his surprisingly strident speech to the Lowy Institute on November 6, the Prime Minister acknowledged that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had found that it was "90 per cent probable" that humans were responsible for climate change. While there is a 10 per cent doubt, it is unlikely that this debate will be silenced in Australia - irrespective of the views of British diplomats in the Antipodes.

SOURCE



British Labour Party candidate who described the Queen as 'vermin' and a 'parasite who milks the country' is forced to apologise

We read:

"A Labour candidate has been forced to apologise after describing the Queen as 'vermin' and a 'parasite'. Peter White, who is standing in next year's local elections, posted the republican diatribe on the social networking site Facebook.

Last night Mr White was forced to issue a humiliating apology by Labour high command, and was threatened with deselection as election candidate.

The comments met with a furious reaction from other visitors to the web page, and Mr White later deleted his comments. But they had already been saved by Mr Rosindell.

Mr Rosindell said: 'People are absolutely furious that someone in such a position would publicly describe the Queen as vermin and a parasite. It is outrageous: a disgusting thing to say about the head of state. 'If he is republican, he has the right to state his case. But the use such foul and nasty language against the Queen is simply offensive. Even most republicans respect the fact that she has been an excellent head of state.'

Source

He has every right to say what he thinks but this was just plain dumb. The Queen is very highly regarded in Britain. He is just handing the election to his political opponents with comments like that. All British political parties support the Monarchy, even the Scottish Nationalists.





17 November, 2009

The British Labour party’s heartland won’t be fooled on immigration again

There is something a little pitiful watching Gordon Brown tell the country how worried he is about immigration, and how it must not be a taboo issue. Like watching a paralytic drunk explaining in slurred tones how he will never touch another drop, and all the while you can smell the paint-stripper on his breath.

There is no issue — with the possible exception of Iraq — on which Labour has been more deceitful to the public at large, or has more egregiously betrayed its core working-class support. The only reason Brown is addressing the issue now is that we are six months away from an election and he fears that the troglodyte BNP thickoes will chew away great big gobfuls of angry working-class voters across a diagonal swathe of supposedly Labour country, from the white-flight satellite towns of Essex to the old mill towns of east Lancashire.

It is little more than lip service from the prime minister and, worse, unaccompanied by even the vaguest admission that his government has let its people down.

We know from the Labour backbencher Chris Mullin’s diaries that ministers would not address the issue of immigration because they were terrified of being called racist: so they did nothing. More recently, the former home office adviser Andrew Neather suggested that the Labour government threw open the doors to vast numbers of immigrants precisely in order to create a truly multicultural Britain, whether or not the British public wanted such a thing (every opinion poll suggests that they did not).

Labour ministers insist that the previous Conservative government was lax on immigration, too — but that is a specious argument. In 2006 nearly 600,000 immigrants entered Britain, more than 10 times the number who arrived in the last year of John Major’s government; the scale of difference has been beyond reasonable comparison. We should be clear: immigration is primarily Labour’s mess, and it was a deliberate policy.

Even now the argument will be queered by the usual platitudinous drivel; that while addressing this important issue we must all nonetheless embrace the vibrancy of multicultural diversity. The people who always preface their answers with this sort of statement tend not to have lost their jobs to cut-price plumbers, electricians, fruit pickers and so on.

You cannot have it both ways: Brown wishes to capture the votes of the white working class by talking about immigration but not actually doing anything about it. They in turn resent, rightly or wrongly, the fact that their communities have been changed beyond recognition; that street crime figures are up exponentially; that it’s harder to acquire social housing; and that they are priced out of jobs. This is unpalatable to many, but it is how a lot of people feel.

It would be far more honest of the government if it said: tough luck, Labour voters — we want a cheaper unskilled and semi-skilled workforce and we have no moral or intellectual objection to your towns and cities being transformed by huge numbers of people who may not share your cultural values. That, after all, has been the policy of the government for the past 12 years, even if it is one it has not dared to articulate but has instead pursued by a sort of cack-handed stealth.

Nor, aside from the carefully nuanced rhetoric, is there very much in the prime minister’s speech which offers a solution to the problem. For example, he wishes councils to look more kindly on social housing applications from long-term local residents — but of course the councils are statutorily required to offer housing first to the homeless and an awful lot of immigrants are, de facto, homeless when they arrive.

None of this is the fault of the recent immigrants themselves, of course, who are behaving much as we would all behave in similar circumstances; and in the main, I don’t believe those working-class voters blame the immigrants either. They know who to blame — and crocodile tears shed a few months before polling day tend to confirm, rather than dissipate, that blame.

SOURCE



Thousands of British Parkinson's disease sufferers wrongly diagnosed

Around 6,300 people in the UK who believe they are suffering from Parkinson's disease could have been wrongly diagnosed, a new study has claimed. Researchers in Scotland, who assessed patients on anti-Parkinson's medication, found that five per cent had little more than stiffness or hand tremors.

A report published in the Movement Disorders journal warned that millions of pounds was being wasted on unnecessary drugs each year. While the wrongly prescribed medication was not thought to have any adverse side effects, patients were subjected to years of anxiety.

Dr Keiran Breen, one of the authors of the report said Parkinson's was a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose accurately in its early stages, but recommended all suspected sufferers should be referred to specialists regularly. He said: "No two people with Parkinson's disease will have the same diagnosis. The three main characteristics are tremors, slowness of movement and stiffness, but not everyone will have all three symptoms. The patients should be referred to neurologists with more expertise and they will make a much more accurate diagnosis."

There are around 120,000 sufferers in the UK but during the study more than five per cent were found to have been misdiagnosed. Dr Breen said: "We didn't find evidence that taking drugs caused harm to the patients without Parkinson's but it could mean people were denied the correct drugs to improve their actual condition."

SOURCE



Controversial electronic medical records to be rolled out across Britain

Anybody who trusts the British bureaucracy with their personal information has not been listening. There have been dozens of instances of "lost" records -- and the computer system concerned has long been full of bugs

Every patient in the country will have sensitive medical information uploaded to a controversial central database within two years. Ministers insist that the records will allow patients to be treated more efficiently no matter where they are in the country. But critics have warned that the centralised database could be open to abuse.

Experts said that patients could also feel “forced” to allow highly sensitive material on the system because ministers have decided to include all patients across the country unless they specifically opt out. Patients in London will have their confidential records uploaded by the end of next year on to the NHS computer network known as the Spine. Family doctor practices across every party of the country will be transmitting the data by the end of 2011.

The records will contain vital basic medical information including illnesses, medications and vaccination history. They could also include past conditions patients had suffered and previous medication they were given. Age and address would also be included but not other personal information, such as marital status. Ministers have admitted that extra medical information could also be added in the future, including controversial do not resuscitate orders.

In May, the Government performed a u-turn when they announced that patients would be allowed to delete electronic summaries of their treatment records from the new database. Previously, they had insisted that to do so would be too costly. Doctors have to ask a patients’ permission every time they wish to view their records, except in emergency circumstances, such as when they feel a patient may be at risk. Only medical staff directly involved in a patient’s care will be allowed to look at the information. But all patients will be added on to the database unless they specifically refuse.

Ministers insist that the records will improve care as doctors no longer have to rely on patient’s memories, which can often be incomplete or inaccurate. They claim that elderly and more vulnerable patients, including those who do not have English as a first second language will benefit the most. Pilot projects trialling the Summary Care Records scheme have taken place across the country in recent years and more than 700,000 patients currently have their records uploaded.

Mike O’Brien, the Health Minister, said: “Having the right information at the right time can make all the difference to patients’ experience of urgent care. “Summary Care Records can improve the quality and safety of treatment provided as well as increasing people’s comfort and reassurance. “We are particularly interested in the experience at Bury which has incorporated End of Life wishes for a substantial number of patients. “Moving the NHS from good to great needs improvements such as this.” Ruth Carnall, chief executive of NHS London, said: “Getting hold of health records for London’s highly mobile population often presents real challenges to doctors and nurses when patients need out-of-hours and emergency care.”

But Dr Grant Ingrams, chair of the British Medical Association's GP IT committee, warned that patients could feel that they were being forced to put highly confidential information on the system. He said: “Electronic Summary Care Records have the potential to improve both quality and safety of patient care but it is critical for the programme’s success that all patients receive balanced information and are made aware of their option to opt out. “If patients feel they are being coerced, or have a summary care record created without their knowledge or understanding, it will damage the credibility of the project.”

SOURCE



Oxford and Cambridge universities relying more on their own entrance exams

The inevitable result of dumbed down High Schools and grade inflation

Students are facing a battery of new tests to get into Oxford and Cambridge amid continuing fears that A-levels fail to mark out the best candidates. More than 70 per cent of Oxford applicants are required to sit an entrance exam in subjects such as history, English, languages, mathematics and science this term, compared with 50 per cent just two years ago.

The development has fuelled a dramatic rise in demand for private tutors set up to help teenagers negotiate the admissions process. One company reported a doubling in the number of enquiries for coaching specifically to pass Oxbridge entrance tests.

It comes as record numbers of school-leavers attempt to get into the two universities in 2010. Oxford has already announced a 12 per cent rise in applications, with a similar increase expected at Cambridge.

An increase in entrance tests – sat by thousands of candidates this month – will fue