… the ones that the press dubbed “Mrs Anthrax” and “Dr Germ”. Who were accused of all sorts of Nazi-concentration-camp-style crimes?

They’ve been released without charge by the Americans.

The Blair government, rather than reforming the 50-year-old law on prostitution, has decided to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to street prostitution. (Thus employing, again, one of its favourite phrases.)

This is supposed to be linked to services to help the sex workers off the streets – the government says 95 per cent of those on the streets are drug addicts. In theory, fine and good. Ditto that male clients are supposed to be as much the target as the primarily women workers.

Except, what is easier? To swoop along the street and pick up women leaning against telegraph poles dressed in fishnets and miniskirts, or to pick up men who stop – men often who will have the money for top lawyers, and a neat cover story about being lost and asking for directions. Who do you think is most likely to be nicked, and convicted?

And what will be easier, fining those women (where WILL the money come from?) and locking them up for a few days or weeks, or meeting their complex needs for addiction treatment, counselling, support, accommodation, etc? Will the government really put in the money to make that happen? What WOULD the Daily Mail think?

Reading through a chronology of London history I came to 1506, the headline “Brothels suppressed”. “A royal ordinance this year suppressed the ‘stews’, or brothels, of Southward, but 12 of the 18 were allowed to reopen shortly afterwards.” (From The Annals of London John Richardson)

It seems governments never learn.

***
An anniversary worth noting: 30 years since the British Sex Discrimination Act.

That link is to a reasonably positive view, but the Indy has gone for the negative:

Women working part time today earn nearly 38.4 per cent less than men performing equivalent work. In 1975 the figure was 42 per cent. For full-time workers the gap is 17.2 per cent compared to 42 per cent 30 years ago. … each year about 30,000 working women are sacked, made redundant or leave their jobs due to pregnancy discrimination.

I tend to think we should be celebrating; there’s a lot to do, but one hell of a lot has been achieved in three decades.

A link to share with anyone who bought a four-wheel-drive vehicle (SUV) because it made them feel safe:

FOUR-wheel-drive vehicles were involved in all three NSW fatal road accidents in which four people died over the Christmas period.

And yes the dead were all passengers in the vehicles. (Although of course they are also highly dangerous to other road-users.)

Even the defenders of The Mousetrap, which has been filling a London theatre for 52 years, admit that its artistic merits, if any, have long been eclipsed by its status as an institution. It will continue, perhaps even should its audience mutate into another species, but can Agatha Christie survive as a writer who still have something to say to the modern world?

Her fiercely protective estate had put a moratorium on theatre productions of her work, in an attempt to “freshen them up”, so when And Then There Were None, in a new adaptation by Kevin Elyot, opened at the Gielgud it was not just this production, but the whole theatrical future of Christie, that was at stake.

The play is still reasonably true to the original tale of a party of ten people, who are morally if not legally murderers, summoned to an isolated island to meet their just desserts – well except of course that the old title, Ten Little Niggers has long been sentenced to death. Rogers, the butler, keeps a lower-class stiff upper lip as he continues to minister to 10 guests invited to the house party by the mysteriously absent hosts, within minutes of learning of the death of his wife, and the stage is filled with crusty military types, proper spinster ladies and all of the other inhabitants of an ideal English village circa 1920. READ MORE

How to win the pub quiz, or set the unanswerable one. When did the last steam train run on the London Underground?

Astonishingly, the answer is June 1967 – they were used for transporting night-time maintenance crews. No wonder the native mice are soot-coloured.

And with the new Wembley Stadium apparently in trouble, it seems the site has a problematic history. Sir Edward Watkins, the chairman of the Metropolitan line, set out to build a tower higher than the Eiffel that was supposed to attract customers. It was not a success, and was never completed.

The Northern Line, as it is today, started out badly, as it was to continue. The carriages were called “padded cells”, because there were no windows – the theory being there was nothing to look at.

From: Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets Stephen Smith, Little, Brown, 2004.

It is an old adage, but one scientists seem to never learn. If you ramp up biological productivity, by breeding cows to be mere milk-producing machines, by using huge quantities of fertilisers, or by dumping shit in fish ponds, you might get more output, but you’ll also get environmental and other side-effects. The latest, quite possibly the spread of bird flu:

Bird flu may be spread by using chicken dung as food in fish farms, a practice now routine in Asia, according to the world’s leading bird conservation organisation.
Fertilising fish ponds with poultry faeces, which can dramatically improve fish growth, may set up major new reservoirs of avian influenza infection if the chickens providing the manure are infected themselves, according to BirdLife International, the Cambridge-based umbrella body for bird protection groups in 100 countries.
The suggestion, which has echoes of the BSE outbreak in Britain – when cattle were infected by their food – puts a question mark over a technique firmly backed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as a primary means of providing protein for mushrooming populations in developing countries.
Known as integrated livestock-fish farming, the technique involves transferring the wastes from raising pigs, ducks or chickens directly to fish farms. At the right dosage, the nutrients in the manure give an enormous boost to the growth of plankton in the ponds, which are the main food of fish such as carp and tilapia.

(I’ve quoted quite a bit of that because it will disappear behind a paywall in a few days.)

But in an early bid for an IgNobel prize, a scientist has calculated Earth could hold a population of 1.3 million billion. That is on the basis of their heat production alone not overheating the planet. Which means?

Assuming that every person emits 120 watts of heat and that it would be uncomfortable if the average temperature at the Earth’s surface rose too much, the researchers declared the Earth could sustain 1.3 million billion people without overheating.
Writing in the journal, the researchers acknowledge the Earth’s resources could be put under severe strain long before the theoretical population peak is reached. “Constraints like food availability or physiological necessities may become critical in the relatively near future. But they are subjected to a continuous change as a result of the development of human civilisation and technology,” Dr Badescu said.

It seems some parts of science have still to recognise the dangers of their own arrogance.