November 2006

"In one brand of chips the amount of trans fat was 13 times higher than claimed on the label... it was impossible to police nutritional claims because there was no rule on how wide of the mark they could be"

"It is in insisting that two and two might be five, or three, or anything he says, that Big Brother shows absolute power in Nineteen Eighty-Four"

but lawsuits continue: "CSIRO will take on Intel and Dell in one case and Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Netgear in the other"

"The parliamentarians who devoted 700 hours to debating hunting and only seven to Iraq still managed to produce an act riddled with inconsistencies and loopholes"

"Book publishers seem to be the worst offenders. And, ironically, veiled women are often used to promote books by and about women who reject the niqab"

"The only change will be cosmetic... I don't see a transformation of family power structures on a wide scale."

"There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

"He was frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering"

"come mating time, koalas morph into aggressive, smelly creatures that you'd never want to cuddle in a million years"

"Stopping Lieberman now isn't simply a matter of politics; it's a battle for the survival of Israel as an inclusive society, and one that must be fought both inside and outside the government."