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The BBC have made a remarkable scientific breakthrough which has eluded the world’s medical researchers.

They have discovered that unborn infants fall into two distinct classes.

If the mother wishes not to bring the the unborn infant to term, it becomes, by a process not yet fully understood, a ‘foetus‘.

“The procedure involves the extraction of the body of the foetus into the vagina before the contents of the skull are sucked out, killing the unborn, after which the intact foetus is removed from the woman’s body.”

If the mother does not wish to kill the unborn infant, but threatens its life with, for example, cigarette smoke, the unborn infant becomes a ‘baby‘. Again, more research is needed to establish the exact mechanism by which this change occurs, but the infant can become a ‘baby’ within six weeks of conception.

“A study found that nearly a third of women whose partners smoked more than 20 cigarettes a day lost their babies within six weeks of conceiving.”

Whereas an unborn infant whose mother does not wish to give birth remains a ‘foetus’ up to the ninth month of pregnancy.

“Partial-birth abortion is one in which the foetus is partially delivered before the pregnancy is terminated.

The procedure would not normally be used until 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Most are performed late in the second trimester, which ends at 27 weeks into pregnancy. However, “partial-birth” abortions can be carried out right through to the ninth month of pregnancy.”

UPDATE – tidied up (with a hint of stealth edit) 9.06 am 03/03/2005

Stephen Pollard reports hearing Sir David Frost on ‘Breakfast With Frost’ introduce Vanessa Redgrave with:

And now, the social conscience of us all, Vanessa Redgrave.

Pollard has his own preferred introduction.

This seems to me to be another case where you suspect the BBC presenter must have their tongue in their cheek at first, but it appears not.

Is the government going to be driving around with “Computer detector vans” soon? Will you need to pay the government to use a computer?

The BBC faces losing hundreds of thousands of pounds in licence fees because of a legal loophole that allows viewers to watch television on the internet for free.

Soaring take-up of broadband and technological developments are making internet-streamed television a reality.

Last summer, for the first time, the BBC broadcast coverage of the Olympic Games live on the internet for people to watch on their computers. It has promised to put further broadcasts on the internet as part of a corporate social responsibility drive aimed at boosting broadband take-up and preventing users “falling on the wrong side of the digital divide”.

However, although the licensing authorities maintain that anyone watching television on their computer would need a television licence, Ofcom, the communications regulator, and the Department for Culture, question that claim.

Ofcom says that there is a grey area as to whether a licence is required for watching television on the internet.

A spokesman for the Department for Culture said initially that a licence would not be needed and that it was “monitoring the situation”.

However, it later said that it would be “inappropriate for the Government to comment on licensing requirements . . . for specific types of equipment”.

is the director of television at the BBC, and she explains her philosophy thus:

“People who express highly controversial views are welcome on the BBC but they cannot be presenters of a news or current affairs programme”.

So what’s Paxman doing working there, then?

“Television must be allowed to engage with the real world, to challenge and inform audiences”.

So that’s why we pay our licence fee. To be patronised, uncontroversially. Can’t be easy.

Several people pointed out this piece by Justin Webb about deducing the innermost soul of America from half a dozen guys you met in a ski-lift gondola*, too. It seems the same piece was spotted (in its first incarnation as a Radio Four broadcast) by Myrna Blyth of NRO. (Hat tip: Hazel Stein.)

Actually, I’ve got a soft spot for Justin Webb. No one who can write

Faced with another round of exquisite jellied meat products I heard a secret service agent expressing in pithy terms a desire for hamburgers. Very old white house.

can be all bad, although the subeditor who left out the initial capitals on “White House” deserves to be ejected into space or Manchester.

During the three days of his Tour Diary, Webb also praises President Bush’s jokes and carries a torch for Condi. Against that, I have to say that the line where he worries that the entire Muslim world can see cheerleaders on TV is tediously over-earnest in a very British way. What say you, comrades? Shall we spare him, come the glorious day?

*Talking of extrapolating the American psyche, I read the wonderful Lileks Olive Garden screed when it first came out. But all you get is this 404 page. New link, anyone?

Several people have pointed out this Normblog post linking to, and quoting from, an article by Bartle Bull in Prospect Magazine.

Iraq is not about America any more. This has been increasingly true every day since last June, and the failure – or refusal – to recognise this has underpinned much of the misleading coverage of Iraq. In the evenings leading up to the election, I sat on carpets on the floors of a variety of shabby houses in the Baghdad slums. But the daily BBC message I watched with my various Iraqi hosts never budged. The refrain was Iraq’s “atmosphere of intimidation and violence,” and the message was that the elections could never work. What about the “atmosphere of resolve and anticipation” that I felt around me? Or the “atmosphere of patience and restraint” among those whom the terrorists were trying to provoke?

Interestingly, Mr Bull reports for the New York Times, a paper that is often seen as having a similar line to the BBC.

is how the BBC’s Nisha Pillai introduced a report by Brian Barron about the growth of Christian music, radio and publishing in the US on BBC News 24’s Reporters programme this week. Did you notice a far right putsch in the US last November? Me neither, though I do recall a democratic election – one in which the winner took office in accordance with the law. Either the BBC’s definition of ‘America’s far right’ is very broad, covering 50% plus of American voters or they’re spinning us their interpretation of reality again.

Notice also the conflation in Pillai’s introduction of ‘far right’ with ‘evangelical Christians’ – a faulty presumption, slipped in as if fact. Whilst there may be some individuals who fall into both groups, I am sure there are many in each group who would be aghast at being tarred with the brush of the other.

This conflation isn’t an isolated occurence – Joan Bakewell, reviewing the Sunday papers on the BBC’s Frost on Sunday this morning referred, with considerable angst, to “far right Christians” protesting about the forthcoming national tour of Jerry Springer, The Opera, tarring the right with the brush of apparent religious intolerance, quite at odds with the typical British right-of-centre view on matters like this, namely to let them all get on with it – let the theatre producers put on their play, let the protestors have their protest, so long as whatever is done is peaceful and within the law – although recent events in Birmingham, where Sikh protestors disrupted and forced the cancellation of a theatre play they didn’t like, may make these particular Christians feel that intimidation
works in Blair’s Britain, since the police declined to enforce the law to the extent necessary to protect free speech in the Birmingham case. Not that Bakewell mentioned any of this while slandering the right.

You’ve probably seen this article from the Times. As Neil Craig of A Place To Stand On says, it’s “generally going round the anti-green bits of the net”

SOD OFF SWAMPY

WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.

What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”

Neil Craig writes:

“I only caught his side of the story today from the net & it is only published in this form by the Times & Washington Post. When I first heard it on the BBC (Radio Scotland but I assume elsewhere too) they reported a successful attempt by Greenpeace to occupy the Exchange. So the BBC were, at best, taking Greenpeace’s report verbatim & putting it out as news.

“Judging news either as something new & unexpected or simply as entertainment the fact that they got kicked out is much the better part of the story but most of our media either chose to print only Greenpeace’s PR without checking or checked & decided to suppress the real story.”

writes:

In browsing the BBC complaints website recently, there is a report on complaints over the last few months, preceded by a statement from Mark Thompson, the Director-General.

In that statement, I found a remarkable sentence. He states:

“Of course there will always be cases where people are dissatisfied with the BBC’s initial response, and the aim then is to give them the opportunity of independent investigation by the Editorial Complaints Unit – and it will be genuinely independent, because we have removed the requirement for the Unit to seek agreement from the management of the programme division before finalising a decision to uphold a complaint. Cases already in the system will be processed according to the old rules, but the Unit’s view on the cases which reach it after 1 February will be final, subject only to appeal to the Governors.”

(I have added italics and emphasis). Is it not incredible that under their pathetic complaints system, if I have understood this correctly, the BBC Complaints Unit had to get the programme division (this presumably means the actual makers of the programme would be consulted and would be dragging their feet all the way) to first agree to a complaint being upheld against them. How likely is that to happen? Turkeys voting for Christmas ?

(from Blithering Bunny)

Rare good news story about Iraq sighted at BBC:

Iraq’s devastated marshlands can be partially revitalised, says a team writing in the journal Science.

(via reader D. Burbage).