How the NHS covers up fatal blunders
CLARE BOWEN will never know exactly how her five-year-old daughter Bethany died in an NHS hospital operating theatre.

All she has gleaned is that her child bled to death after a trainee surgeon used an experimental rotary cutter, inserted with a keyhole technique, during a routine procedure to remove her spleen. Several cuts were found in her main artery, stomach and digestive system, but records that should have explained what went wrong have mysteriously disappeared.


Barack Obama just won’t stop until the US turns into Europe
The fiscal train wreck is happening sooner than we thought, a leading bond-market trader says. The passage of the healthcare bill has focused investor attention on the runaway deficit. The deficit, which was about 3% of GDP in President George Bush’s final year, is now exceeding 10%. (All numbers rounded and all data taken from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.) Government debt has gone from 40% of GDP when Bush left the White House to 63% and will hit 90% by 2020. That’s the level at which new studies show that debt begins to reduce growth and jobs.

Unfortunately, the situation is even worse than reported figures suggest. For one thing, the accounting tricks used to get the healthcare bill through Congress made it seem a deficit-reducer. It isn’t.


My fee? £2,500 a day...plus expenses
Two more former ministers have been caught telling our undercover reporter they would trade their contacts for cash, casting new light on the secretive world of political lobbying

('Tis a pity Oliver Cromwell is dead. Here's what he had to say to the Parliament of his day just before he shut it down:

"It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!")