A new video of Saddam Hussein. You know Caroline Hawley thinks it a serious development, because she’s managed to restrict herself to a handful of front-loaded sentences, instead of her usual strategy of using that construction in almost everything she says.

Lots of good stuff around to read at the moment, but most of it doesn’t feel deserving of a full post – mainly because there’s nothing more I can say about it. So I’m putting it all in this post instead.

Andrew Brown wonders, quite rightly, what’s happened to Terry Schiavo’s autopsy results, which we were promised very quickly after her death. Where have they got to, and why haven’t we heard anything about them?

Hopping back just over a week, Sarah Left is amusing herself about the fact that bloggers are always asking for straight answers to straight questions, and now they’ve got a straight ‘Nee’ from the Dutch, they’re not entirely sure what to make of it. She links to Edward at A Fist full of Euros, who send us over to The FT for a list of twenty reasons why ‘Nee’ doesn’t really mean ‘No’. Good grief.

Also on the Newsblog, Jane Perrone reports about a shocking discovery by NASA, who discovered space suits for space spies in a room that no-one had opened. And to think NASA say they’re underfunded – they have rooms that haven’t even been opened for years, let alone used.

Nothing to Declare tell us that the Daily Express have finally lost patience with their readership, after their front page announcement that “94% of you believe Diana was murdered”. NTD always makes me smile.

And finally, b3ta have announced the winners in their Phallic Logo Awards (via Onlineblog). As they say:

The game designers across the nation are playing is; can they design a logo and get it approved without the client realising it’s a big spurting penis?

From the results, at least, it appears they can.

Gordon Brown, in a very Prime Ministerial speech, today announced that the G8 finance ministers have agreed, subject to conditions, to wipe out 100% of the debt owed by eighteen countries with immediate effect using an IVA. Those countries are Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. A further nine (Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Sao Tome, and Sierra Leone). This will cost, in total, around about $55bn.

That at first glance, seem relatively laudable. But really it’s not that helpful. Adding all of the debt African countries owe to external countries and bodies, we get to $300bn. This is aid worth $55bn, and Bolivia, Guyana, and Honduras aren’t actually in Africa. So it probably leaves Africa around $250bn in debt. According to Freedomdebtrelief.com reviews, ActionAid reckon that there’s another forty countries that need immediate 100% debt relief.

And as a sidenote, how many of those people walking round wearing white bands supporting this kind of action could point on a map to any of the countries named above? Some people would say that’s irrelevant, and that they are showing caring for people rather than demonstrating their knowledge. But the campaign is a political one. How can they possibly support a particular political campaign if they don’t understand it’s mechanisms and implications, and can’t even place the countries on a map?

Back to the point… Compared to what’s gone before, this debt relief is a pretty big leap. But far more needs to be done to make a huge impact, and I hope that the G8 will throw up some bigger and brighter ideas. Whether debt relief is the best way of helping these countries is also open to question, and I have to say that I’m not convinced. We need much more open public education and debate on these issues. The campaign should be raising awareness and educating, not just asking people to send letters that they quite possibly don’t understand to Tony Blair.

Essentially, whilst the action that’s been taken is clearly laudable, a lot more must be done, and it’s not time yet to rest and feel good about ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of people die needlessly every day, and this won’t stop that. We just have to hope that one of the great minds of our generation can think of a real solution, and that the conscience of the world will lead us to implement it – even at great cost.

This seems to be almost living in my inbox recently:

This is a genuine psychological test. It is a story about a girl.

While at the funeral of her own mother, she met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much her dream guy she believed him to be, that she fell in love with him there and then… A few days later, the girl killed her own sister.

Question: What is her motive in killing her sister?

If this actually worked, then I would be some kind of raging psychopath, given that I didn’t just get the ‘psychopath’ answer, I got it instantly. It was perfectly obivous to me. I’d love to sit and debunk it myself, but Snopes does a much better job than I would.

And if you’re interested, the answer’s there too.

I’m very excited to announce that you can now download an sjhoward.co.uk toolbar for Internet Explorer, which allows you to search the web, read and listen to the latest headlines, and have one-click access to lots of your favourite sites (including this one, of course). For more information, check out my toolbar page, or for more detail, check the page hosted by my partner in this exercise.

I’ve just shunned the Google Toolbar in favour of the sjhoward.co.uk toolbar, so it certainly proves useful to me. But that’s because I designed it with, erm, me in mind. If you do decide to give it a go, then it is (of course) completely free, and dead easy to uninstall should you choose to do so. And I think it goes without saying that it’s spyware and virus free.

Hope you find it useful!

It’s another of those slightly incongruous bits of personal news that slip in here from time to time… Much like last year, my recent exams have not culminated in me having to attend a viva. That’s good news, which fell into my inbox a little under an hour ago. Talk about fresh, breaking news. Yippee.

There’s a title I never thought I’d be writing. I refer, of course, to his little performance in the Commons today:

The UK rebate will remain and we will not negotiate it away. Period.

His choice of American idiom has caused something of a storm. As the ObserverBlog puts it,

Has someone, like, just come back from the States, or what?

I have to say that his particular choice of word doesn’t particularly bother me: It just highlights how out-of-touch he is with the British people. And that hardly constitutes news.

But with Mrs Blair yesterday and Mr Blair today, one does have to wonder if this blog is turning into something of a family affair. Tomorrow: Meet Ewan.

Not really.

Given the slightly silly way in which Mrs Blair has had to be included in the recent trip by the Prime Minister to the USA, with the two just ‘co-incidentally’ being in the US at the same time on different trips, and Mr Bush just ‘happening’ to invite her along, would it not seem logical to formalise the arrangements and have an official role for the Prime Minister’s spouse, a role on which they could be elected alongside their husband rather than just happening into a job of such power?

Even the Prime Minister’s Spokeswoman agrees with the general idea that Mrs Blair is an important stateswoman: After all, earlier today, when asked why Mrs Blair was introduced to the President by Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Washington DC, she responded that this was normal for

any prominent British citizen visiting Washington DC

I might be overanalysing this, but my dictionary defines prominent as ‘conspicuous in position or importance’. As far as I am aware, Mrs Blair has no official elected position, and certainly no formal importance.

I have no ideological problem with the Prime Minister’s spouse taking a bigger official role – I think that a First Lady style position could be very useful in some circumstances – and I think Mrs Blair is given an exceptionally bad press in this country for no good reason. But to take a bigger role means that they will no longer be able to hide behind the ‘privacy of the family’ excuse when things get tough. Mrs Blair simply cannot have it both ways: She cannot be both a stateswoman and also free from accountability. She has to take one with the other. And if she does, then good luck to her.

Gideons International recently asked Leicester NHS Trust if it could put Bibles into patients’ bedside lockers. The hospital responded that they would like some time to investigate whether or not there was a possibility that having the same Bible there for each occupant might pose an MRSA risk. To me, that seems a sensible request.

Iain Mair, executive director of Gideons International UK doesn’t think it’s sensible:

They are saying there’s a potential MRSA risk, and we say that is nonsense

I’m not sure what expertise Mr Mair has in the field of infection control, but I’m fairly convinced that he doesn’t have quite the same qualifications as the Trust’s Infections Control team. He claims that Gideons International have commissioned reports from consultants to disprove the theory. Surely there would be little point in commissioning such research if he is not then going to allow the Trust to examine the research prior to reaching a decision on the matter?

The tabloids have become (predictably) become angry about a ” hospital plan to ban Bibles” recently. Despite the fact that there is, as yet, no such plan. But that’s not the kind of thing that’s stopped them before. Other papers called it ‘tantamount to banning the Bible from NHS wards’. That’s obviously not true either.

The Leicester NHS Trust also wish to take time to consider whether allowing the provision of these Bibles would appear as the Trust favouring one religion over another. Which is a fair enough thing to consider. Unless you’re Iain Mair, in which case…

It’s political correctness gone mad.

It would clearly be impractical to have a whole library of religious books supplied to each patient. And yet, I wonder if Mr Mair would think it ‘PC gone mad’ if all patients were to be supplied with copies of the Koran, and, along with his plan, given advice that ‘other religious texts are available’.

The Trust wants to investigate the possibility of tracking which patients have come into contact with which texts, so that potentially infectious ones could be removed from circulation. That seems fair, if something of an invasion of privacy. The best solution, as I see it, would be to make patients aware that religious texts were freely available to take away and take home. That way, the religious texts get further than just being something to read when you’re bored in hospital, and the infection problem is essentially overcome.

I’m sure the Trust will come up with a solution that will be appropriate to all parties. Although, frankly, I’d be rather less inclined to help when Gideons International want to make such a fuss over such a small issue. But that’s probably just me.

Anybody who follows the news will know that Newsweek recently made the slightly absurd claim that a soldier at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Koran down the toilet. Clearly, they didn’t think through the physics of the situation, and evidently later had to retract the story. The official White House line was that Newsweek had done ‘lasting damage’ to the US image in the Muslim world. Given that the Pentagon have now released details of incidents at Guantanamo Bay where guards kicked, wrote obscenities in, and threw water and splashed urine on copies of the Koran, this frankly makes the White House look plainly and openly vindictive.

Before condemning Newsweek, the White House must surely have looked into the case to confirm it wasn’t true. And in the course of that investigation, these other incidents must surely have cropped up. And yet the White House has the audacity to condemn not the soldiers who have abused the Koran, and by association the Muslim world as a whole, but Newsweek. Even though the central message of the story – that the Koran was being mishandled – was effectively true. It’s not even that difficult to see that the ideas of covering something in urine and that of flushing it down the toilet are not that far removed from each other, and could easily become confused in translation.

The Newsweek story caused riots across the Muslim world, and thus indirectly led to the deaths of at least fifteen people in Afghanistan. Does the White House really believe that these people were protesting because of the particular details of the Newsweek story, or does it believe that the riots were caused by the US’s lack of respect for other cultures? Or does the White House no longer hold any true beliefs, other than belief in the supremacy of the US and US citizens?

Of course, this action is not a million miles removed from our own Andrew Gilligan incident, whereby he reported that the Dodgy Dossier had been ‘sexed up’. Effectively, it had. And yet, for tripping up on the details – in this case, misrepresenting the position of David Kelly – Gilligan and the Beeb were condemned. Yet the story was basically true.

Is it right that administrations should cover their embarrassments by ridiculing the relatively minor errors of others? The argument can be made that the media are forever condemning politicians for minor slips and lexical errors. But, in my mind at least, this does not mean that they can do the same to the media. Politicians, whether they like it or not, are quite rightly held to a higher standard. They have to prove to us that they are worthy of leading the country, and that they have the moral standing necessary to lead a country morally. To refuse to admit to a wider problem because of small errors in accusations – indeed, to ridicule the person who made those accusations – is neither moral nor open.

And to think, politicians wonder why the public don’t trust them.