Gates Takes on Polio
Bill Gates has now turned his big guns on polio. Good!
The Search for the New Ratfinder General
Rats have been seen scuttling around Number 10 Downing Street, for the first time since Cherie Blair was rumoured to have banished the last Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, Humphrey, to another place.
The real problem is not finding the cat, but giving the new appointee, a suitable name.
Abba Eban
I always like people who use English properly and thoughtfully. Abba Eban was one such person, although I may not always have agreed with everything he said and did.
The Times yesterday quoted him memorably in the second leader.
History teaches us, that men and nations, only behave wisely when they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Many of the world’s stupid leaders could improve their nations, by following the words of the man, The Times credits as the founding father of Israeli democracy
Mail Scams
There is a piece this morning on the BBC about mail scams.
Since moving, I’ve been receiving the most amazing amount of junk through my letter box. A lot is flyers for things like takeaways and mini-cabs, neither of which I use. But some looks like mail scams, so it goes straight back in the conveniently placed pillar box opposite marked “Return to Sender”. As the house was tenanted before I bought it, there has also been a few letters, to those tenants, who might have done a runner.
I just wonder though, if all of the scam mail was sent back marked for return, the government and the Royal Mail, might take a bit more concerted action, against the countries from where it comes.
Opera Just Got Interesting
I read in the Sunday Times, that the Royal Opera House is going to stage an opera based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Apparently, there will be a lot of sex, swearing and partially, if not fully exposed bosoms. The BBC says it will be one of the arts highlights of the year.
This is the final paragraph from the article in The Sunday Times.
In recent years members of the Covent Garden audience have tut-tutted over naked breasts in Verdi’s Rigoletto. When Anna Nicole opens next month they may not know what hit them.
Globalisation Hits Executions in the United States
Globalisation is often blamed for many of the world’s problems, but here’s an article that says that the same process is starting to hit executions in the United States.
The news has broken today that the sole US manufacturer of a key drug used in lethal injections will cease production because authorities in Italy, where the drug was to be made, wanted a guarantee that it wouldn’t be used to put inmates to death.
Hospira Inc. of Lake Forest, Ill, had decided to switch production of the anaesthetic sodium thiopental from its North Carolina plant to Liscate, outside of Milan. But the Italian Parliament wanted the company to control the product’s distribution to prevent it being used for executions. Hospira decided it couldn’t make that promise and has decided to suspend production — potentially throwing the death penalty system in the US into disarray.
But what’s missing from today’s reports is that behind the Italian Parliament’s insistence is a lay Catholic movement dedicated — among many other things – to the eradication of the death penalty around the world. The Rome-based Community of Sant’Egidio had been engaged in discussions with Hospira’s Italian subsidiary, Hospira SL, which led to meetings with the Foreign Affairs minister, Franco Frattini, and the Ministry of Health. The result of those meetings was an agreement that the production of the drug in Italy would have to be for strictly therapeutic purposes. The company has long deplored its use in executions, and said it regretted the need to cease production.
Hospira’s choice to end production because it couldn’t give that guarantee was described as “highly responsible” by Sant’Egidio’s spokesman, Mario Marazziti, who said: “It highlights the point that therapeutic drugs and doctors should never be used to bring about death”.
Sidium thiopental is already in short supply after the British government last November also banned the UK manufacture of the drug following a campaign by the British NGO Reprieve. According to the Wall Street Journal’s law blog, Hospira’s decision means the death penalty system in the US “is potentially thrown into turmoil”. States can attempt to use another anaesthetic instead — Oklahoma, for example, has switched to a drug used to euthanise cats and dogs
— but it involves seeking clearance from the courts, which is likely to delay executions.
There is a lesson here about globalization. It’s not just the market that’s gone global. It’s civil society pressure, too.
I also applaud the work of the Catholic church here.
7/7 Inquest Reporting
This article entitled “Doctors truggled after 7/7 bomb” is almost unfair. It criticises the fact that no medical equipment was available outside the BMA, where the bomb was detonated on the number 30 bus.
Doctors at the British Medical Association struggled to treat victims of the 7/7 bus bombing because there was no medical equipment at their headquarters, the inquests have heard.
Instead they used table cloths, jackets and ties as bandages for the wounded.
The hearings were told the doctors utilised “bits of bus” including windows as makeshift stretchers.
So should we ask suicide bombers to explode their devices in approved places, where doctors, paramedics and equipment are all readily available?
I don’t know how I’d react in such a situation, but I suspect all those doctors who struggled, are now much better doctors!
The World’s Most Stupid Hotel Owners
The ruling against hotel owners in Cornwall reported here on the BBC, probably says that some people shouldn’t open certain businesses for their own financial health. I’ve listened to what they have said and they would like to ban any unmarried couples from sharing a room in their hotel. So it’s not just gays, but from what they have said, they wouldn’t allow me, as a widow to share a bed with one of either sex.
Surely, in times of austerity, you want all of the business you can get.
Now here’s an idea! There are a lot of widows out there living as couples. Why not book a night in the hotel? When they say you can’t sleep together, you can supplement your earnings with a little bit of legal chicanery. There are also plenty of lawyers out there who would do it on a no-win no-fee basis.
The Mother of Statistics
After last night’s program, The Joy of Stats, it was good to see one of Florence Nightingale‘s coxcomb charts in the business pages of The Times in an article headed, Bloodied but largely unbowed, things are looking up for Toyota. The chart has been missed off the web edition.
She was so much more than the Lady with the Lamp.
She also had a massive input into Brunel’s design for the prefabricated hospital at Renkioi in the Crimea. Here’s an extract from Wikipedia.
Brunel was working on the Great Eastern amongst other projects, but accepted the task in February 1855 of designing and building the War Office requirement of a temporary, pre-fabricated hospital that could be shipped to Crimea and erected there. In 5 months he designed, built, and shipped pre-fabricated wood and canvas buildings, providing them complete with advice on transportation and positioning of the facilities. They were subsequently erected near Scutari Hospital, where Nightingale was based, in the malaria-free area of Renkioi.
His designs incorporated the necessities of hygiene: access to sanitation, ventilation, drainage, and even rudimentary temperature controls. They were feted as a great success, with some sources stating that of the approximately 1,300 patients treated in the Renkioi temporary hospital, there were only 50 deaths. In the Scutari hospital it replaced, deaths were said to be as many as 10 times this number. Nightingale referred to them as “those magnificent huts”. The practice of building hospitals from pre-fabricated modules survives today, with hospitals such as the Bristol Royal Infirmary being created in this manner.
Sad to say, we don’t solve problems in that way anymore. Today’s civil servants would never let two people like Nightingale and Brunel even talk to each other, as they would come up with something that made the civil servants all look to be the dunderheads they inevitably are.
Remember that it takes twelve civil servants to change a light bulb. One to actually change the bulb and eleven to do the paperwork.
The Anonymous Widower 