One of the most persistently popular articles I’ve published over the last year or so was a compendium of statistical information relating to rape, which I put together last November in an effort to put some reasonably reliable figures under this very important and, at times, highly contentious […]

The American Foundation for AIDS Research has published a new issue briefing, which fully deserves to be widely circulated, which assesses the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education programmes for HIV prevention amongst young people. The briefing pulls together the evidence from a wide range of published studies covering […]

I lost my grandad to lung cancer, oh, too many years ago. Long enough ago that I couldn’t say for sure exactly how old I was when he died without ringing my mom to ask her when it was. Memories fade over time, but the one vivid legacy […]

Kevin Arscott of the ‘Angry Mob‘ blog is a reasonably well-known figure in the British blogosphere, one of several bloggers who specialise in tracking and exposing some of the worst excesses of tabloid and mid-market national titles, including The Sun, Daily Express and, of course, Daily Mail. This […]

Another week rolls by and another missive from the Advertising Standards Authority drops into my in-box leading me to yet another batch of informally resolved cases in which a variety of alt-med practitioners have had to remove health-related claims from their websites in order to comply with the […]

Before getting down to business I should perhaps explain the overall purpose of this current series of posts. I’ve been researching and documenting the dubious conduct of Nadine Dorries for quite some time, in fact a little over four years. Over that time I’ve accumulated rather a lot […]

Earlier today, the Open Rights Group reported that ‘detailed website blocking proposals have been presented by rights holder groups to Ed Vaizey’ by a cabal of rights holder groups including the FA Premier League; the Publishers Association; BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited; the Motion Picture Association; and […]

Before getting back to the business of chronicling Nadine Dorries’ spiralling descent into Palinesque fucknuttery, I need to take a bit of a detour via a recent post on the Bailey Review to respond to a moderately interesting comment, albeit one which nicely illustrates both the complexities of […]

It used to be said that a lie told often enough becomes the truth*, although not necessarily by Lenin as the the attribution of this statement to the artist formerly known as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to him is, at best, apocryphal. Joseph Goebbels*, on the other hand, did […]

If you’ve caught the BBC’s news output this morning on television, radio or teh interwebs, you’ll have seen this: Parents’ behaviour ‘can influence teen drinking’ Children who see their parents drunk are twice as likely to regularly get drunk themselves, a survey of young teenagers has suggested. Poor […]