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The case of King's College London   © www.CartoonStock.com King's College London is in the news for all the wrong reasons. In a document full of weasel words ('restructuring', 'consultation exercise'), staff in the schools of medicine and biomedical sciences, and the Institute of Psychiatry were informed last month that 120 of them were at risk of redundancy. The document was supposed to be confidential but was leaked to David Colquhoun who has posted a link to it on his blog .  This isn't the first time KCL has been in the news for its 'robust' management style. A mere four years ago, a similar though smaller purge was carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, together with a major divestment in Humanities at KCL. Any tale of redundancies on such a scale is a human tragedy, whether it be in a car factory or a University. But the two cases are not entirely parallel. For a car factory, the goal of the business is to make a profit. A sensible emplo...

I was appalled a couple of weeks ago to see this advert by PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Readers of this blog will be aware that spurious claims of links with autism is one subject that gets me extremely cross - parents have quite enough to contend with, without the host of irresponsible people who come up with a new autism cause every day . Needless to say, there is no scientific evidence for a link between milk consumption and autism, and so I wondered why on earth PETA should be promoting such an idea. I didn't know much about them until this advert cropped up. I first came across PETA when I was in Australia and they had a campaign protesting about "sheep ships" - live export of animals to the Middle East. I was impressed at the way they highlighted the treatment of the animals, who were taken on a long sea voyage in vile conditions just so that they could be slaughtered in a particular way on arrival. Now that I've read more background...

©CartoonStock.com Things could not be much worse for Liberal Democrat party. After catastrophic results at both council and European elections a couple of weeks ago, there have been questions raised about Nick Clegg's leadership, and resignation of senior LibDem Matthew Oakeshott . Now it's being suggested that Chris Rennard, former Chief Executive who was suspended from the party in January after allegations of sexual harassment were made against him, should be reinstated. A few days ago, Rennard issued an apology to the women who had complained about him, something he'd been asked to do before his suspension. His supporters, who include powerful people such as Alex Carlile and David Steel, argue that the party needs him: he has undoubted skills that have come from experience of managing the party over many years. In particular, Carlile is quoted as saying that Rennard had now done ‘everything asked of him’, and: Lord Rennard has been harassed by this inquiry for a ye...