health check

I received a very worrying newspaper cutting through the post this weekend. (Yes, I know people who still communicate by ‘real’ mail and take the trouble to clip and send on articles of interest.) It came from the UK Metro, and the headline read Take the Pill ‘for a long life’. What was particularly disturbing was the following phrase that also appears on the web version of the story:

Women who take the contraceptive are 12 per cent less likely to die compared with those who never have.

The same story on the IBTHealth site says:
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(mis)reading skills

From a BBC news story, yesterday:

“Plans have been published by ministers in England to tackle the “social exclusion” of adults with autism.
[…]
[T]he cross-government strategy sets out a range of measures to help them have “rewarding and fulfilling” lives, including training for Jobcentre staff.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with Jobcentre staff. I’m not even sure they were called “Jobcentres” back then. Surely we used to go to sign on at the Labour Exchange? (Was it the Tories who implemented the name change, afraid that the ignorant unemployed would believe their benefit cheque was funded entirely by Labour and vote accordingly?)
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picture perfect?

This double-page advert comes from today’s El Mundo newspaper:

advert for el mundo image processing course
Honesty in journalism?
Is it just me, or is there something slightly disturbing about the press offering to teach people how to ‘retouch’ images?

all the rage

I haven’t been following the X-factor/Rage Against the Machine story, but it’s one of those things that filter through even if you aren’t the least bit interested in it, and the headlines this morning make it unmissable.

Even so, the only real interest I have in the story is that it’s triggered a memory of being asked by a Swedish friend’s son, back in the early Nineties, what Rage Against the Machine meant.
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word power

They say that in Valladolid they speak the purest Spanish. And apparently it’s powerful as well as pure.

From the Castilla y León pages of El Mundo, the headline: “Una pareja de sexagenarios desarma a un atracador en su portal sólo con palabras”.

The story begins:

El poder de la palabra es inmenso, pero no sólo en sentido figurado. Solamente con ese arma, una pareja sexagenaria logró desarmar al atracador que trató de robarles cuando entraban en el portal de su vivienda en […] Valladolid.

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