The Director of Public Prosecutions has today published interim guidelines on prosecutions for assisted suicide in England and Wales – they’re available here (and Northern Ireland will get its own consultation process). I’ve not had time to consider them in full, but there’s a number of things that stand out to me as worthy of comment. […]
Category: Resource
Swine Flu: A Titanic Struggle
The Department of Health today launced Exercise Prometheus, an exercise for the social care sector to assess and develop its resilience planning in readiness for a second wave of the pandemic swine flu. Designed as an ‘off the shelf’ package primarily for use by local authorities in partnership with their local providers of social care, the […]
AIDS=Nazism?
This is a very strange story that’s been picked up by the Daily Telegraph: a German Aids charity has been attacked for launching an advertising campaign – and a pretty sexually explicit one at that – in which people who spread HIV are presented as Hitler. I’m not sure whether the target is people who […]
Are you a Lazy academic? Try Dropbox
Over on the Philosophy and Bioethics Blog I run a series called Academic Ease, posts aimed at making the life of academics easier/lazier. I thought today I might share one of those hints over here. One of the curses of a modern academic is trying to ensure that the files on your various computers remain […]
If you’re at a loose end in London…
I found myself yesterday at the Wellcome Collection, one of my favourite museums in London and somewhere I visit reasonably frequently (not being too big, and conveniently located on the Euston Road, it’s perfect to fill those odd hours between the end of the hangover and the train back to Manchester). The permanent exhibition has […]
I’m Glad it’s all Over
A little while ago, I mentioned Jamie Ross’ admirable Cancerous Capers blog. Well – for all the best reasons – there won’t be any more updates. His reason? Having cancer was tedious enough; but with radiotherapy over, banging on about not having it would be even more tedious. Assuming he gets the all-clear in a couple […]
Anyone’d Think I was Addicted
It’s another one of those posts about drug policy, I’m aftaid: this week’s All in the Mind covered the Portuguese experiment with decriminalisation (about which I posted recently), and is available to listen for the next few days. Depressingly, one of the contributors dropped a fairly broad hint – accurately, I think – that the UK […]
Ask a Homeopath a Question…
The Guardian has a feature in its “Ethical Living” feature called “You Ask, They Answer”. This provides a forum in which readers can put questions to firms, people and so on. This week, the subject was Neal’s Yard Remedies, purveyor of… um… “remedies” to the kind of people who go in for aromatherapy and homeopathy […]
Engelhardt Lecture, Cambridge: Can Someone do me a Favour?
Tristram Engelhardt is giving a lecture entitled “Moral Pluralism and the Crisis of Secular Bioethics: Why Orthodox Christian Bioethics has the Solution” at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Wesley House in Cambridge on the 3rd June. It’s a provoking title – and my guess is that I’d probably disagree with just about every word after “Good evening”. Notwithstanding this – […]
Drug Policy Transformed?
I’ve spent the morning looking over the Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s consultation paper, A Comparison of the Cost-Effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs, which was published today. The full report is available as a .pdf here (note the filesize – at 445k, it’s HUGE) – or there’s a summary on Transform’s blog, here. […]