Ministry of Truth

Let’s keep this simple and cut through the bullshit with a few facts that some people seen very keen to overlook. FACT – The police officer, PC Toby Rowland, to whom Andrew Mitchell MP briefly spoke at the gates of Downing Street on the evening of 19 September […]

A brief story published in the Weston, Worle and Somerset Mercury seems to be provoking a fair degree of head-scratching on Twitter at the moment for what I hope should be fairly obvious reasons: Zoo’s education award NOAH’S Ark Zoo Farm has achieved recognition for the education programme […]

What is it with Sunday newspapers and contraception? First we had the Mail on Sunday’s utterly irresponsible piece of front page scaremongering around the risks associated with third generation oral contraceptives, now we have Tim Lewis’s article on the problems of developing a ‘male pill’ in The Observer […]

A couple of days ago the Director of the Hacked Off campaign group, Brian Cathcart, published an article on the Huffington Post containing a table of figures that the Press Complaints Commission would much prefer that the public didn’t see, one which shows which newspapers attracted the most […]

I don’t usually do ‘drive by’ posts about articles I’m working on but haven’t yet completed but looking at some of the stuff that’s turning up in my Twitter time-line this morning I want to throw out a couple of quick observations that might interest and, in some […]

So, without wishing to waste time recapping events that are probably already familiar to most of my regular readers, the ongoing shitstorm of the wonderful Jesus and Mo cartoon strip started with this tweet by Maajid Nawaz: To me, it matters that you can see that for yourself. […]

As regular visitors to the Ministry are well aware I’m something of an obsessive fact checker. Show me an article in the media that says ‘research has shown…’ or ‘scientists have said…’  and my immediate reaction is pretty much always ‘citation please’ unless the article to a field […]

Even by my own standards this is a long article at a little over 14,000 words including references. The main subject of the article is a recent Chinese ‘ABC’ (Abortion-Breast Cancer) study, a meta-analysis of 36 studies looking at the relationship between induced abortion and women’s risk of […]

By now I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that Maajid Nawaz, a Lib Dem PPC in Hampstead and Kilburn, stands accused of committing the thoroughly heinous crime of causing religiously aggravated butthurt in the first degree, the suggested punishment for which appears to be political career death […]

I’ve never been one to leave a job half done so for this article I’m heading back to The Independent’s grossly overheated and incompetently executed ‘Lost Girls’ story to finish off the job I started last week by looking, albeit rather obliquely, at the two comment piece that […]