SUPER: BRITAIN'S PLAN TO FIGHT SUPERBUG INFECTION SUCKS

Oh good:

Confronted by an epidemic of drug-resistant staph infections, the UK government has promised to fight back. But experts say their plan is more pose than solution. Among the proposals made by health secretary Alan Johnson are "deep cleans" for hospitals and short sleeves for doctors and nurses. But a Lancet editorial blasts Johnson, saying that such steps, while looking nice, don't actually follow what superbug science recommends.

A system of socialized medicine has undoubtedly ensured that the best, brightest, and most competent British subjects go into medicine. So we're not worried about that. But we are starting to suspect that maybe - at some point - the relationship between humans and the natural world species has gone awry. And that we're all very much screwed.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]

SWISS PRESIDENT INVITES IRAN TO OFFER "VARIOUS PERCEPTIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST" AT CONFERENCE

There was a time when Europeans' behavior was limited by a certain sense of taste and an aversion to the unseemly. That time is long past:

Switzerland secretly approached Iran offering to hold a conference regarding "various perceptions of the Holocaust" in Geneva, the Swiss magazine Weltwoche reported earlier this week. The proposal was made via confidential memorandum from Switzerland's President, Micheline Calmy-Rey, to Iranian deputy foreign minister Saaid Jalili, during his visit in Switzerland last December. The Swiss foreign ministry objected to the idea, annulling it. Calmy-Rey's proposal, which would have voiced anew the Iranian doubts over the very existence of the Holocaust, outraged many Jewish organizations, which demanded she apologize.

Charming, no? We wonder if they would have held the conference in a bank. Or maybe some kind of tastefully decorated conference room. "Mme. Calmy-Rey", the Iranian representative would say, "that's a lovely painting. Wherever did Switzerland acquire it?" To which she might respond: "oh that old thing? You know, we have no idea - it just turned up around here in the late 1940s."

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]